Don't have time to listen to our podcast? No worries, here is a brief summary of the discussion with Jim Yaun
The Importance of Continual Learning
In this episode, we are in conversation with Jim Yuan, a partner at Joyview education, an education consulting and project-based learning company that helps students develop into compassionate global citizens. He is also a part of the digital nomad community, an Estonia E resident, and a lover of history. He previously was the VP of operations at an Agribusiness in South East Asia and graduated from Northwestern's McCormick School with a Master's and Bachelors in electrical engineering and did his MBA from Kellogg School of Management.
Jim was also a consultant at Accenture, a multinational company, which was also the time he had the opportunity to work with a lot of Indians. He shares how he felt while he was a consultant and how that taught him to be a good listener and also helped him to interact better with clients. Jim was also a part of a company called Shnieder electric and he loved their culture of being very environmental, green, and sustainable. Jim explains how learning about international businesses in international markets and understanding the global and local sides can have different views. These views can be a contrast from the traditional ways of learning that most of us are used to, we might have to sometimes put in the cultural context as well as the localised context to understand and analyse better. Jim explains how he was interested in the digital nomad community and how that was a major transition for him, this was the time he bought a one-way ticket to Bali and also when he noticed that so many different individuals started to build their lives without trying to be confined with the concepts of traditional learning, these individuals included, freelance designers, entrepreneurs, and everyone who stepped out of the conventional systems.
He believes that people have this fear from an existential perspective which is why they often refrain from making these plunges. This helped Jim learn a lot while he was conversing with different people from various backgrounds, and it also really helped the people get out of their comfort zone and talk about how they wanted to be sovereign individuals. He also shares his experience on how he learned most of the things outside of university and what it was that he found beneficial throughout his journey. He believes that most of the things that you learn about your career, you learn on the job instead of in university.
He talks about how this has become a spectrum of some sorts and that it is an ongoing debate with educators in terms of efficacy. He explains that probably colleges and universities need not necessarily be the best place for a career jumpstart since, in your career, you learn from a holistic perspective and that learning should be more organic and continuous. The traditional way of book learning or having that mental framework is a fallacy and the truth is that learning for every individual is an ongoing process that does not stop. He strongly believes that schools should incorporate the practice of learning, and how to make learning a constant process. Schools should be a safe space for every individual to mess up and learn because maybe in certain places, it is not alright to mess up but schools should be the place for individuals to fall and get back up at their own pace, and through this, learn. He explains how it makes no sense for schools to be so heavy on exams, which is counterproductive.
At a corporate level, however, it gets harder since individuals have a lot of pressure to perform in a certain way and it can be costly for the company if you make a mistake because at the end comes that performance review which will most likely highlight the same mistake. Jim encourages all our listeners to log onto https://1729.com and to take a look at Balaji’s and the team's interesting concepts about education. Jim's conversation is truly motivating and his advice to everyone listening is that success only comes after a lot of failures and that maybe try looking at the world through multiple nuanced coloured lenses as opposed to just black and white.
You can connect with Jim on his LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jim-yuan-21a62610/