From birth, every one of us embarks on a journey of discovery to learn about ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves. Some of us are better at learning than others and we either progress through life to become highly qualified and highly competent or we barely manage to complete our schooling and spend the rest of our lives fending for ourselves at the most basic levels of human existence.

It’s a fact of life that our capacity to learn, our willingness to learn and our actual learning competence play a powerful role in who we are, what we do and what we become in this brief life on earth.

How good we are at learning is largely dependent on how willing we are to learn and that is largely determined by our first years of life. If we are encouraged, stimulated and inspired to explore by those who care for and raise us, we have a much better chance of being an effective learner.

Of course, what we choose to learn is also dependent on personal interests and preferences, and on our natural abilities and aptitude. Those of us who learn skills and qualities that enable us to engage in activities that are in demand by others will have a much better chance of success.

The human brain – the centre of our learning – is a wonderful yet strange organ. It can be our best friend or our worst enemy. It can be both creative and destructive. It’s a matter of personal choice. There are not-so-bright people who have made good choices in their live and done well as a result, and there are bright people who have made poor choices and ended up living lives of misery.

Then again, some people get to a point in their careers where they think they have learnt enough and they effectively stop learning. Big mistake. That’s why a number of responses I received when I asked HR Directors and L&D Professionals what their point of pain is at work referred to the fact that their executives’ brains were set in concrete – stuck in an inflexible leadership mindset and not open to embrace very necessary changes.

Take a good look at the leadership of your company. If your leadership team is displaying a reluctance to embrace the latest changes, see that as a red light flashing. It’s telling you that they subconsciously think they’ve learnt enough and don’t have to learn anything new. If that’s indeed the case, big problems lie ahead for you and your company.

Sure things will continue as “normal” for a good few months and even years … until your competition, who has indeed adapted with the times, starts delivering better services and products than your company can. And then the slow, or quick, decline begins. Usually at that stage, it’s too late to recover and, like many multi-billion dollar companies before you – who thought they were too big or too successful to fail – your company starts to falter and fail, joining the list of “also rans” who in time are simply forgotten or remembered for their monumental failure.

But that need never happen if you can create and nurture a learning culture that encourages and inspires everyone, from top to bottom, with no exceptions, to continue learning. To create such a culture, it’s important to help people to understand that new information is not necessarily difficult information. It’s just new. And when they come to understand that principle, their fear of “new” information subsides, opening the door for them to explore new learning opportunities.

Naturally, people will and should learn different skills and qualities, depending on their role in the company. And as they continue to grow their knowledge, expertise and competence, they – and the company – will stay relevant.

Here’s a key life principle: if you don’t continue learning, you don’t stay relevant. And once you lose your relevance, your brain turns on you and becomes your enemy. It tells you that you’re no longer needed on the planet and slowly starts to shut down. When that happens, you’re on a one-way ticket out of here.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking, “Oh, that will never happen to me!” It’s happened to many others before you and can and will happen to you.

While you are healthy in body and mind, you need never feel sorry for your brain. The more you use it, the better it becomes. As you make a point of learning on a continual basis, you fire up new connections and use experiences you have acquired through your life and career to turn your brain into an asset rather than allow it to become a liability.

Alan Hosking is the Publisher of HR Future magazine, www.hrfuture.net and @HRFuturemag. He is an internationally recognised authority on leadership competencies for the future and teaches experienced and younger business leaders how to lead with empathy, compassion, integrity, purpose and agility. In 2018, he was named by US-based web site Disruptordaily.com as one of the “Top 25 Future of Work Influencers to Follow on Twitter“. In 2020, he was named one of the “Top 200 Global Power Thought Leaders to watch in 2021” by peopleHum in India. In 2022, he has been named on the Power List of the “Top 200 Biggest Voices in Leadership in 2022” by LeaderHum.