Our generation is busier than ever-before. We’re all time-constrained, facing ever-increasing pressures at work and at home. Staying on top of everything while adding learning to the mix is not an easy thing to do. It’s essential though, if we want to keep growing, personally and professionally. Lifelong learning is not just a sexy word. It’s what makes the difference between staying relevant in our line of work versus falling into oblivion.

Learning increases our mental bandwidth, improves our decision-making skills and helps us perform at our best. The brain is not a muscle, but it acts pretty much like one. Exercise it regularly and it will stay healthy and get fitter. Fail to train it properly, and it will atrophy. If we’re not learning, we’re not being stuck at the same level as before, but actually getting worse. This is because the world around us is moving ahead. Fast. Jump on the bandwagon or you’re left behind.

Those who know me personally know that I am a nerd passionate learner. I am curious by nature and I find great pleasure in reading and learning new things. Despite this, it took discipline to integrate learning into my schedule and make sure it always stays top of mind. In this story, I will share the key things I’ve done that helped me never stop learning.

1. Pick your key learning topics

In his bestselling book “Outliers: The Story of Success”, Malcolm Gladwell popularised the 10,000 hours rule. In short, he claims you need 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in any one topic. This stemmed a heated debate regarding the statistical validity of the observation, since not all practice is equal. The 10,000 number comes across as quite arbitrary (although round, catchy and easy to remember).

What is certain though is that you do need practice to become an expert. And you do need to keep learning in order to stay ahead of the curve. One key mistake that I’ve done in the past was spreading myself too thin. There are so many things out there that you can learn, so many different topics. What is important is to pick the key topics that are interesting for you AND relevant for your career. Hobbies aside, unless you plan to start a business around them.

Before carefully prioritising, I was consistently reading about many different things to satisfy my curiosity. While this helped me build a general understanding of various topics, it didn’t actually help me become an expert in any of them. Instead, it drew me into the generalists’ trap: that place where you know a bit of everything, but you’re not an expert in anything. As a result, I decided to fiercely prioritise and narrowed down my key topics of interest to just three:

• Growth
• Product Marketing
• Leadership

2. Follow people and organisations you can learn from

The easiest way to stay up to speed with what is happening in your industry is to follow key thought leaders. The good part is that technology has made it really easy to do this. The bad part is that there are so many widely available resources out there that you risk being overloaded with information. To overcome information overload, you need to do a careful selection and prioritise what matters to you.

Just for the purposes of exemplification, here is my list of people that I regularly follow:

• Andrew Chen, General Partner Games Fund One @ Andreessen Horowitz, best-selling author, ex-Uber, ex-founder. I read his blog, follow him on Twitter and I’m subscribed to his newsletter;
• Lenny Rachitsky investor and author of Lenny’s Newsletter and Lenny’s Podcast, ex-Airbnb, ex-founder. Lenny creates excellent content on product & growth;
• Hiten Shah is a serial entrepreneur, having started multiple SaaS companies – among them Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics and Quick Sprout. He has a blog and sends the SaaS Weekly newsletter where he shares great articles on business, product, marketing & sales, growth and management;
• Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve, Co-Founder & CEO of Alan, French health-tech unicorn. I had the pleasure of meeting with JC and really clicked with him and his general approach. He sends a weekly Substack newsletter where he shares his favorite articles, documentaries and books. I am genuinely impressed by his curiosity and I deeply resonate with the culture he built at Alan;
• Reid Hoffman, Partner @ Greylock, entrepreneur, investor & strategist. It should come as no surprise that I am a “groupie” of Reid’s. He is a master of all things growth and a neverending source of valuable resources. Among them: the Masters of Scale (podcast & book), The Startup of You (podcast, book and newsletter), his blog (a hub of all his posts and online essays);
• Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI & the former president of YCombinator. He has a brilliant “How to start a startup course” and I also follow his blog.

As for organisations, I am a big fan of Reforge – not only are their programs absolutely fantastic, but they also have plenty of incredibly valuable content on their blog. On product marketing, Product Marketing Alliance has an exceptional Content Hub with great articles, eBooks, industry reports, webinars, podcasts, videos & more, as well as the PMM Pulse newsletter. I also read Harvard Business Review.

3. Go through what your thought leaders are sharing

The fact that you subscribe to a newsletter or hit the follow button on LinkedIn or Twitter doesn’t actually mean you’re following your chosen thought leaders. You need to invest time to go through what they share, select what’s relevant for you, read and apply the learnings. This is a learning process and finding time for it, between your personal and professional commitments, can quickly turn into mission impossible. That is unless you actually put this time as a non-negotiable block in your calendar.

After several iterations, I found out that the following is what works best for me:

• Take 30 minutes every morning to check out what’s new from people and orgs I follow and read newsletters. All while taking my morning coffee;
• Book 2 hours per week to read articles / essays / case studies. I normally do this on Friday afternoons.

By doing this, I have a minimum of 5.5 hours per week to learn things that I further apply in my work.

4. Read, read, read

Reading is an excellent way to train our brains and learn new things that are relevant for us. I am a big fan of the traditional, paperback reading experience: the feeling you get when turning pages, the smell of freshly printed books. Unfortunately I rarely read on paper these days and I’ve traded that experience for the convenience of digital books. Kindle has become my best friend because I no longer have restrictions on the number of books I can carry around with me. Plus, I am highlighting and taking notes as I read, and I further email these to myself once I finish a book, making it easier to review later on.

While I’ve always been an avid reader, I struggled at times with finding time to read. I’m really proud that it’s more than 10 years now since I’ve been reading between 12 and 40 books per year, irrespective of my personal and professional circumstances. I only managed to do this once I made sure that not a single day passes by without reading. While in the morning I focus on catching up with industry news and reading online, the evenings are for books. I read at least 30 minutes every night, before I go to sleep.

To do this, I gave up watching series and replaced Netflix & chill with read & chill. Series are still my guilty pleasure, but I watch them while I run, hence hitting two birds with one stone. Sometimes I’m really tired or simply not in the mood for professional books. To keep the habit of reading, I change business books with biographies or fiction (I’m a sucker for mystery thrillers and medical stories). When this happens, I read the books in either Spanish or French, to make sure I also train my language skills as I read and relax.

5. Take paid courses

With the advent of technology, education as we knew it has fundamentally changed. We now have access to so many world-class learning programs from the confort of our homes. We can learn everything on our own terms, self-paced or on more stricter schedules, whenever we want. There’s simply no excuse for not doing it. Problem here as well is choosing the courses to take from an overwhelming offer. When doing so, I always look at:

• Relevance. How relevant is this course for me? How does this learning support my overall career objectives and ambitions? To answer these questions, I carefully study the curriculum and learning objectives of the programs I’m interested in. If there’s a fit, I go on and enrol. If not, I move on. In the end, it all comes down to prioritisation: I’m not learning for the sake of learning, but learning to become better at what I do.
• Quality. How good is this course? While it’s hard to actually assess the quality of a course before taking it, I always look at a couple of things. First, the reputation of the institution that delivers the course is a really good proxy for its quality. Secondly, student ratings, where available, are really insightful to get a better understanding of the program experience. Last but definitely not least, I always search on LinkedIn to read experiences of alumni, as well as their career paths after graduating the program.
• Time commitment. How much time will this program take to complete? Do I have any chance to fit this into my already hectic schedule? I came to realise that I need to be very pragmatic about this. There’s simply no way for me to enrol in a program that requires 20+ hours weekly while working full-time and raising a kid. This is the reason why I’ve never taken an executive MBA so far, although I’d love to do this.

Besides all the above, price is also a key factor to take into account. On one end, you have to be able to afford the program you’re going to take. On the other, I strongly recommend enrolling in paid courses as opposed to free ones, for multiple reasons:

1. It increases the likelihood of finishing the program. The biggest problem with online learning is the dropout rate, which is much higher than that for traditional education. Paying for the course has a positive psychological effect: it increases your commitment to the program. Also, most of the paid programs have specific timelines, with a certain degree of flexibility. This means that you don’t end up watching classes every other month, but actually learning on a schedule.
2. A paid course normally has a higher standard of quality. While I will not put an equal sign between price and quality, the two are definitely correlated. On one end, paid courses are generally updated regularly and more time is invested in their creation and maintenance. It’s just fair for the instructors to be paid for their work – otherwise, they would just find a better use of their time. At the other side of the table, if you are paying for the course, you will be more careful when making the purchasing decision. You want to get real value for your money, so you’ll do your due diligence more carefully and hence end up taking the right course for you.
3. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. I’m quite skeptical about the free programs available on the internet. Truth is, if you’re not paying for the course, you’re generating value for a third party by simply taking it (either you’re becoming a lead for a B2B business or you’re targeted with different types of ads). Simply put, if you’re not paying for the product, you might be the product. This doesn’t mean that all free programs are inherently bad. In fact, Hubspot Academy has some of the best free courses on marketing (mostly inbound) for beginners. Even in their case though, the program is free because you are becoming a lead for their product, hence generating value for the company.

As a rule of thumb, I aim to always be enrolled in one paid course at a time. From my experience Ivy League online courses are radically better than all the other courses I’ve taken so far. If you’re searching for inspiration, here’s where to find some of the best business courses in the world:

• edX – Online platform offering executive education programs from leading universities, as well as Master Programs and Bachelor Degrees;
• Stanford Executive Education. Stanford also has a flagship executive education program called LEAD that I strongly recommend. I am enrolled in the 2022 – 2023 cohort and the experience so far has been transformative;
• Harvard Business School Online – I’ve taken Management Essentials back in 2018 and I still apply the learnings to date;
• MIT Executive Education – I shortlisted a MicroMaster Program on Statistic & Data Science and I’m probably going to take it sometime next year;
• Berkeley Executive Education – heard great things about their Product Management Studio, which is aligned with my interests.

If you’re interested in product, growth, engineering or marketing, then Reforge is THE COMMUNITY to be a part of. The Reforge content is simply spectacular, hands-on, applied, no BS. I’ve been a member of Reforge for more than 1 year now, already took 1 live cohort and I’ve learnt so much by being part of the Reforge community.

Make learning a habit

Learning is a lifelong commitment and a process that you need to commit to. These are the things that helped me never stop learning, irrespective of what happens at work or in my personal life. Some might work for you as well, some will fail gloriously. It only works as long as you make learning part of your life and turn it into a habit. To do this, I’ll leave you with a really good book from James Clear – “Atomic Habits”. Happy learning!