lifetime growth. You can have a great deal of experience and be no smarter for all the things you’ve done, seen or heard. Experience alone is no guarantee of lifetime growth. But if you regularly transform your experiences into new lessons, you’ll make each day of your life a source of growth. The smartest people are those who can transform even the smallest event or situation into breakthroughs in thinking and action. Look at all of life as a school and every experience as a lesson, and your learning will always be greater than your experience.” Recently I saw an old Peanuts cartoon in which Charlie Schulz sees Charlie Brown at the beach building a magnificent sandcastle. “It’s a work of art,” Charlie Brown gasps. As he stands back to admire it, suddenly it’s destroyed by a big wave, as he was too close to the water’s edge. “There must be a lesson here, but for the life of me I don’t know what it is,” he says. That’s how many of us feel after a potentially valuable experience. We go through it but don’t grow. We read articles and attend seminars designed to help us learn, then do nothing with the information we have gained. Don’t get excited about a learning event – get excited about learning. Take ownership of information and allow it to transform you so that you return a changed person with a new way of looking at things and with new tools you are prepared to put to good use, for you haven’t really learnt until you own the knowledge and apply it. As an APAN member we will be offering you numerous learning opportunities. So please check the membership details in this journal and join our professional community and you will never look back. Find your passion in life and build your success around it and life will truly be an adventure.
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