It’s hard to argue that continual learning is a bad thing.

The relentless pursuit of heaping more onto our ever-growing mountain of knowledge is a core part of today’s entrepreneurial culture.

And if we want to follow in the footsteps of those who have come before, learning from their successes and failures is a good place to start.

But what if we don’t want to follow in their footsteps?

What if we seek a different path?

Not business as usual, but business unusual?

Yes, we need to learn.

But maybe even more important, we need to unlearn.

Unlearn art.

Unlearn business.

Unlearn marketing.

Unlearn what success is supposed to look like in the first place.

Unlearn our beliefs around our potential to create impact in the world.

Unlearn what it means to create work that matters.

It turns out that not all learning builds on itself.

That sometimes the way forward requires us to turn around and walk away from what we thought was our goal.

Back down the path we’ve spent years walking to find that side spur stretching off into the wilderness.

There are fewer guides on this path, fewer teachers.

And they don’t look like the ones we’re used to.

They don’t appear in our newsfeeds with webinars, masterclasses, or 5-day quick-win challenges.

More likely we find them through whispered word of mouth.

A secret too exciting to be kept to oneself.

Rather than give us the answers they challenge us with questions.

Questions we may have never considered.

Questions that don’t feel like they should have anything to do with the work we create.

Questions that force us into uncomfortable territory, confronting the parts of ourselves we’d rather not look at.

The further we walk down this path, the more we come to understand that these teachers are all around us.

In overheard conversations, the coffee shop down the street, the birds on breeze, the tree shrugging off its coat in the autumn and being reborn in the spring.

These teachers are slow, reticent, timeless, true.

And full of boundless wisdom.

In the end, these are the only teachers we need.

---