The Learning Business

Jonathan Fields was “the kid with the lemonade stand in 6th-grade, the landscaping business in high-school and the mobile-DJ business in college.”

He went on to be a securities and hedge-fund lawyer before ditching the law to open a yoga studio. That led him to learn about copywriting to promote the business. Did he go back to school to study writing? Nope. He went online and searched for information on copywriting. He found the websites and blogs of several top copywriters, red everything he could find and took notes. He found samples of their work and analyzed it.

Next, he bought and read all the books that his virtual mentors mentioned. Finally, he felt the need for more concentrated and personal information and attended a three-day seminar. “I am not someone who likes to surrender to the notion that I need help,” He explained in his book, Career Renegade. “I’ve always pretty much mastered whatever I needed to master on my own. This experience, though, opened my eyes both to the importance of finding a mentor, seeking out live attention, and copping to the fact that I don’t know everything.”

This leads me to two of my favorite quotes about learning:

I’m not sure who said “All learning is self-taught,” but I agree with the sentiment. On the other hand, I also agree with Harvey Mackay that "If everything a (person) learns over a thirty-year career is self-taught, you can bet some of it is dead wrong." Maybe the best learning comes from maintaining the tension between those two points of view.

That said, I have just finished reading Career Renegade, the best, most information-packed book on work that I’ve read in many years. I plan to use it as a workbook to grow my own renegade career.

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