The best ways to learn

SIGHTS AND SOUND WITH XANDRIA OOI

I HAVE always believed that there are two good ways to learn: Learn from a mentor/teacher/boss, or learn through experience.

Either way, the learning process is fulfilling, Both allow us to make mistakes, and the more frequently we fall, the quicker we learn.

I have never had a full-time corporate job; hence, I have never had a boss. I have had mentors for brief periods of time – teachers, editors, producers – but only my parents have consistently mentored me at every major turn of my life.

Parent mentors can be quite different from boss or teacher mentors. Parents usually coach us on life’s issues while bosses and teachers train us to excel in a particular field or business.

A very good mentor, however, coaches us on life and work. To me, the two are two halves of a whole that complement each other.

Some people might say that work is a subset of life, which, logically, is not untrue. However, for many people, work all but consumes their lives. Money is essentially the drive to work harder and in the pursuit of it, we tend to forget that the reason we desire money in the first place, is to live a good life.

How can life be good if it is all about work?

By that, I do not just mean the hours we invest in work. Work becomes larger than life when we are easily angered by mistakes, frustrated by problems and so afraid of being out of the game that we compromise our values or choose to stay in the safest corner of the box.

In some of the most successful companies of this era, work is not about merely surviving or being safe – it is about being different. Take Google, for example.

The Google headquarters (also called the Googleplex) in Mountain View, California, has 20,164 full-time employees. Google hires people not for their skills, but for their attitude.

Douglas Merrill, former chief information officer and vice-president of Engineering of Google, was quoted as saying: “I’ll ask candidates who aren’t engineers how to build a Web crawler. The right answer doesn’t matter. I want to hear you think the problem through, because the odds are good that since we’re an innovative company, you’re not going to know how to do what you’re going to be asked to do. You’re going to have to figure it out.”

At a time when many businesses have resigned themselves to the pursuit of sameness and safety, Google takes risks and gives employees the autonomy to make judgment calls.

It makes perfect sense to me. Why would we hire people and then micromanage to the point of hindering them from doing their jobs? How will a company innovate if people do not present new ideas?

During a job interview right after I graduated, a potential employer had asked: “What is most important to you? Money, workplace culture or career development?”

I thought it over and replied: “Work culture is most important to me; career development, second, and money, last.”

“If I don’t fit into the work culture or if it is not conducive, then I will be miserable and my job performance will suffer,” I explained. “Where there is good work culture, there will usually be good career development possibilities; and if the first two exist, it will enhance my job performance, and when I excel at my work the money will come.”

I have always found that using money as the main motivation is a very dangerous business strategy as it can impede one’s ability to make good and fair decisions.

Not being in the corporate workforce and being my own boss means that the only way I get to advance on the learning curve is to learn through experience. There are both advantages and disadvantages to this.

I have expressed my discontent to my mum on several occasions: “I wish I have someone to show me the ropes instead of groping in the dark!” If I had someone to teach me, the learning process would undoubtedly be faster.

However, the lack of direction was also the reason I took the initiative to be creative and learnt how to troubleshoot problems to make my next project twice as good.

It also means that I dare to think out of the box and be different. Because the faster I fail, the earlier I learn and the sooner I avoid making the same mistakes later on a bigger project.

I have also recently realised that I do not have to grope in the dark. We live in the incredible age of technology. Not only do we have thousands of willing teachers to learn from, we can choose our own mentors.

Websites, articles, blogs – these are the teachers of tomorrow. That is the greatest gift of the Internet – information at our fingertips and at our command.

The time has come when companies are rewarded for being different. It is not a good formula to live our lives well, yet have a separate set of work ethics. The most successful companies incorporate their lifestyle and infuse their personality into their corporate culture.

My company is still an infant, and it is at this stage that it needs clear direction and culture to achieve success in the long term.

Google’s corporate philosophies are casual principles, like “you can make money without doing evil”, “you can be serious without a suit” and “work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun”.

Funny; that was what my mum had been saying since I was old enough to read and write.

Life and work philosophies are not, and should not be, all that different, and I am looking forward to having a good time in my pursuit of success.