Is Hiring Lifelong Learners the Ultimate Competitive Advantage?
Photos by The Creative Exchange, Jeswin Thomas, no one cares
How appropriate to have a section on lifelong learners in this ongoing series about interesting things I learn. Also included this week is a piece that gives hope to us environmentalists, and a question about whether spending money on sleep aids or making better decisions is the key to better sleep health.
Hiring Lifelong Learners
Harvard Business Review published a piece about the importance of hiring people who have a process for learning and its relation to achieving a competitive advantage. The actual process in which they learn isn’t important because people learn in different ways, but what’s important is identifying and knowing your process.
Which leads me to ask, is being an aggressive self-learner the most important quality in applicants and employees? We care about work experience and skills, but is learning to adapt and grow, thus gaining new skills, after joining an organization even more important?
Sleep, A New Industry
“Sleep aids” are the newest addition to the Health & Wellness industry, bringing in nearly $70 billion in 2017. Even though I obsess over my sleep and have spent money trying to improve it, the question I now ask is, is this unnecessary?
Sleep is only harder to come by because of the decisions we’re making. Especially in the United States, where 55% of adults describe feeling stressed, 20% higher than the global average. Add on the intentional stimulation of our brains at night, by working or watching TV, it seems each of us is personally responsible for making bad sleep decisions.
Soil Regeneration and Environmentalism
This comes from a documentary recommendation from my cousin, Kiss the Ground, available on Netflix. The film focuses on “soil regeneration” as a way to combat global warming and reduce the number of CO2 particles in the air.
In short, regenerative agriculture, or soil regeneration, increases organic soil matter and as a result pulls more CO2 out of the atmosphere through crop rotation, no-till farming, avoiding nitrogen fertilizers, rotational animal grazing, and other natural farming techniques.
While not a silver bullet to climate change, regenerative agriculture uses natural resources (soil) to help create better farmland and a healthier planet.
