R.O.L – The Opportunity Cost of Learning

Return on Learning (R.O.L)

People speak of return on equity, return on capital and other forms of return on investment.

In the same way, there is a concept of return on learning.

In the “Age of Information Overload” that we are living in today, it takes wisdom to determine what you should learn, why you should learn it, and when you should learn it.

So whilst there is immense value in reading, studying and engaging in various forms of upskilling, there is no point in just reading books for the sake of it because then it just becomes a form of procrastination.

Action points/notes to self

• Before deciding to take some new book on (I’m admittedly very guilty of this. I have a backlog of hundreds of books. Far more than I can hope to get through in a long while…) I should consciously make the decision because I am giving out chunks of my life (time) in exchange for it.
• I think I need to narrow my “information intake” a little and not allow reading to become a form of self-prescribed, self-sanctioned procrastination, masquerading under the self-deceiving banner of “learning.”

Godspeed,

Tony Lee Jacobs