“Grandpa, how much longer?” My grandsons Brandon and Brian would ask. My response was usually, “when you stop asking”. For some reason they never stopped asking. 

There is a sense of not making any progress your  focus is only on a goal. You have a goal in view but are not conscious how much progress you have made along the way. 

We can apply measuring to learning. I call it The Learning Gap. I learned about The Gap from Bill Harris of Centerpointe who learned it from Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach.  Dan identifies two kinds of people and how these two types measure and evaluate their progress in life. One has an ideal in mind for who they want to be and where they want to go, and they evaluate their progress by that ideal.

An ideal is a concept of what is perfect. An example of an ideal is the horizon. The horizon isn’t real, it exists in your mind. You travel toward the horizon but no matter how far you travel you never get there. When you start to learn something, you may have an ideal in mind and benchmark it against how others have succeeded.  Having the goal with mental pictures to motivate is important. The frustration happens when you measure your progress against your ideal. You never have the satisfaction of making progress. It becomes an exercise in futility because you feel like you’re never making any progress. The gap between where you are and where you want your learning to be stays the same no matter what you do. 

Albert Einstein asked “What if we change the yardstick?”. The question is what are we measuring and why? About 10 years, Linda, my coach, challenged me “What are some other ways to measure your success besides how much money you are making?” For the following week I began to count how many times I smiled while interacting with people. Also, how many times I made a person smile. It shifted my yardstick of success.  It became how many people I touched.  

 Create your own learning yardstick to track your progress. For example, how many books did you read this month. What are 3 things you learned from your reading? What is one thing that you could share with someone else? 

It’s the steps you take on the journey, not merely the destination.  Measure your learning progress by your own standards and  celebrate your learning milestones. You may be surprised at your progress.