Always Learning

It seems like a tough time for businesses. It’s certainly the most difficult 12 months I’ve experienced since setting out on my own, and that includes Covid! It started me thinking about why I still do this in, what are euphemistically called, challenging business conditions. I found an answer in an unexpected place.

Last thing in the evening, sometimes as late as nine thirty or quarter to ten depending on my rock-and-roll lifestyle, I can generally be found sitting in the living room playing Worldle with my daughter. For those of you not familiar with Worldle, I should point out that this is not a typo, it is a less famous relative of the letter-based game where instead of guessing a five-letter word, you have to guess the country by its outline.

We started this a few months back and it rapidly revealed just how bad my world geography was. I never really took to geography at school and staring at a map for hours did nothing to help me remember country names and where they are. Fortunately, times have changed, and there is a bunch of useful stuff out there to help learn these things. For me, country quizzes where you click on an interactive map to select the country really seem to work. I’m definitely not at expert level but hugely improved and have also uncovered some interesting facts along the way. Did you know that Equatorial Guinea isn’t actually on the equator? Neither did I but I do now!

What, you may reasonably ask, is the point of this knowledge? After all, it’s only a Google search away at any time. Well, a couple of things. Firstly, my daughter and I have had good fun learning this stuff, and that in itself is reason enough. Secondly, it has made me think more about the world outside my little corner of Scotland. Now, when I meet someone from Malaysia, or Gabon, or Azerbaijan, I think, “I know where that is!” and it makes me curious to find out more. In what seems like a very divide world, that also feels like a good thing.

Lastly, and maybe most importantly, it reminded me about the value of learning new things. It’s increasingly easy to ask, “what is the point in learning?” in a world where machine learning and other AI tools are become more prevalent but I would argue that this is exactly why we need to keep learning. Mathematical models have always been limited by the principle of rubbish in = rubbish out, the process of learning and critical thinking can help us stop feeding rubbish in. In a busy world I hope we can still find time for learning, if nothing else it might help in that pub quiz!