Hey. First of all, why should we consider concepts like growth, learning, and sharing?

“Growth” is such a powerful word whether it appears as personal growth or life growth that it makes you inspired and motivated to take action and achieve the decided goals.

The global personal development market size is estimated to hit USD 71.42 billion in valuation by 2030 from USD 44.11 billion in 2022 at a 5.5% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR). That means, the statistics are also saying the same thing.

But Wait! There are also some major problems attached to it.

The Challenges with Learning and Sharing

• The huge volume of available content or information creates confusion about what to consume, where to start, and where to stop. This leads to a lack of clarity.
• Approaching growth factors only in extremes as completely right, completely wrong, too specific, and too general. There’s a lack of balance.
• Learning appears to be extremely complex, especially because of the rapid changes in technologies and their impact on daily life.

In fact, “learning demands new approaches in changing ecologies of learning and social practice beyond initial schooling”, says a report in ScienceDirect.

That’s why the “learning and sharing” concept of SharingShree tries to simplify these problems and find solutions by easily communicating related topics.

Okay! Let’s come to the point.

About Growth and Sharing of Information

Depending on the situation or goals, every individual including you may have different definitions and opinions regarding life growth.

More than 90% of the time, it is treated as an end and a fixed point. So when you hear the word growth, probably something like an upward graph line is popping up in your mind.

Is that right?

Here, we use the word growth in the sense of a life journey that covers both ups and downs, successes and failures, or both positives and negatives.

It creates new unique opportunities and sources to learn about relevant topics. When such learnings are shared, the possibility of building useful connections increases to a great extent.

Connections and Communication

While sharing the information about the book “Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides“, Standford’s post provided some interesting insights, which is;

One in five Americans suffers from chronic loneliness, with teenagers and young adults at increasing risk. Social ties at work, at school, and in our communities have frayed.

A close observation of the surroundings makes us think that it is not restricted to a particular country, but spreading throughout the world.

It feels unfortunate to face such problems when we are witnessing rapid advancement in technologies like social media, which enables us to connect and communicate with people easily in a mutually beneficial way.

Then why it is so?

Possible Reasons

• Ignoring the importance of relationships and true friendship.
• Sticking only to online involvement even with people closely related.
• Lack of interest in improving communication skills.
• Wrong usage of connections without fair exchange of values.
• unrealistic expectations, and so on.

To develop a solution-oriented mindset, SharingShree has already taken a step forward by discussing managing relationships in daily life.

Rest will be followed as our journey continues.

Learning and Sharing from Experience and Expertise

Have you observed these types of people?

• One, who doesn’t bother about learning at all,
• The next one with the willingness to learn from their own experience,
• And the other who learns from others’ experience and expertise with their own.

You’re reading this learning and sharing related page, which suggests to me that you do not belong to the first type of people in the above list.

That itself is a great sign of growth.

What do you say?

Ideally, the third type is considered the best. It helps to prevent possible mistakes and to save your resources such as time, money, energy, and so on.

Take SharingShree itself as an example. It was created with the idea of sharing my experience and knowledge and learning from other’s experiences and expertise as well.

Usage of Online Tools and Platforms

Online tools have redefined the definition and the way of growth, learning, and sharing over the years.

They helped friends to connect, to build relationships, created easy ways to learn new things and skills by accessing worldwide information, sharing content with a few clicks, creating employment and business opportunities, and the list goes on.

That’s what makes it sense to be aware of online tools and their rapid upgrade, being a user.

Search Engines

I’m assuming that you are using any one or all of the top search engines of the world like – Google, YouTube, and Bing.

They’re providing billions of search results daily. So obviously it is beneficial for multiple parties involved in it as I said previously.

Being both a user and a content provider through search engines, I think it is important to consider a couple of things while using search engines.

Usage of AI Tools and Technologies:

AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology is not a new thing. To put it simply, social media has been recommending content based on factors such as your interests, online behavior, and so on for the past many years. AI technology has been used in all those processes.

But today when AI is used to create content or to share information, you need to know at least a few basics.

For example– information related to weather or score updates in the sports industry is mostly powered by AI which is accurate and harmless. But if you are going to consume health or finance-related information and then if you’re going to act upon it, you need to take extra care being a user of the information.

Quick Tip:

When you are going to consume high-intent or sensitive information where there is a high possibility of potential losses, you can use Google’s E.E.A.T. formula to measure the quality and authenticity.

E.E.A.T. stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

The simple way of using this formula is by verifying the source and connection of information.

For example– Whenever you consume high-intent or sensitive information from a website (as we discussed above) for research, deep learning, to share with a friend, or to buy products and services, it’s good to go through the About page, their disclaimer or terms of use, privacy policies, contact information to verify the connection and whether is it safe to use.

This wasn’t a major concern earlier, but today it is.

The good news is that search engines are working constantly to provide relevant, useful information and to avoid spam at the same time.

Before you move on, I would like to mention a post I shared on Linkedin. This will help you to understand a creators perspective and get to know some back stories as well.

Social Media

No no. I’m not here to advise you not to use social media. I do use them and they’re a part of my career as well.

Statistics say;

There are 4.8 billion social media users worldwide, representing 59.9% of the global population and 92.7% of all internet users.

It is estimated that the number of social media users will go up to 6 billion users in the next 5 years.

Interestingly, India ranks number 1 with 326.6M+ and U.S. at number 2 with 168.6M+ active users.

Source1, Source2.

This massive growth in the number of active social media users is directly connected to life growth, learning, and sharing that we are talking about.

Based on my own experience with social media as a common user, usage for business purposes, and my client’s experience, I would like to mention a few points.

Quick Points:

• It’s a wrong idea to treat social media in extremes like completely dependent or completely ignorant.
• Trying to find a moderate usage point is the best. For instance, 80% of usage is for learning and growing, another 20% is for entertainment purposes.
• It’s important to have a contributor mindset rather than being a random and endless content consumer.
• Avoiding unnecessary comparisons and setting up unrealistic standards of growth that lead to wrong expectations.
• Constantly monitoring and maintaining the balance between content consumption and its implementation helps to stay away from the theoretical loup which is a barrier to growth.
• Trying not to be a purchaser of wrong or unnecessary products and services that are sold through social media by using unfair marketing practices.

This kind of thought process is highly useful for using social media in the journey of life growth.

Do you agree?

Need for Understanding (Modern) Marketing

Have you felt discomfort about why the concept of Marketing entered here?

Probably the word marketing instantly reminds you of the picture of an irritating salesperson, irritating annoying ads, calls from call centers, and many more things.

Am I right?

Well, that’s reality. But the marketing is not limited to such business-oriented activities only.

Let me try to simplify;

From a business point of view, marketing is a process of identifying the problems and needs of consumers or customers, creating and providing solutions, informing them through ads or other relevant marketing methods, creating the brand to generate recall value, retaining consumers and customers by developing and maintaining a healthy relationship.

If you can grasp the basic essence of this process, you can easily notice the meaning of the famous saying “Marketing is everywhere“. Then you’ll be able to recognize the connections and involvement of marketing concepts in various aspects of life.

Interestingly, a student at the University of London mentioned in a blog How studying marketing can enrich your life that “Unbeknownst to many, the numerous purchase – and even life – decisions we make thinking they were “ours” were already preconceived by someone else.”

One of my favorite marketers, economists, and author of the book “Marketing Management”- Filip Kotler has said;

“Financial success often depends on marketing ability”.

That single sentence contains the importance and applicability of marketing knowledge and understanding in life growth.

Do you still want to identify the relevancy and involvement of marketing fundamentals in life?

Okay. Based on my experience in both offline and online marketing, I can point out a few things that may help you to customize the way it benefits you.

• A basic understanding of marketing concepts can help students strategically choose better career options for themselves by considering the required skills, demand, and supply in a particular industry or field.
• The selling skill being an important part of marketing, makes you much more deserving of better jobs.
• Interpersonal skills like building connections, communication, and negotiations can be developed through the understanding of marketing.
• It is one of the main criteria to measure whether you can start and run your own business.
• This multi-beneficiary knowledge can help you to differentiate needs and wants. You can also observe how their interpretation changes with affordability and stages of life.
• Analyzing and understanding advertisements and marketing messages becomes easy. This is an important factor especially while we are living in the modern online marketing world.
• You can be a smart buyer of products and services by differentiating price and value, saving resources such as time, money, etc.
• Having a marketing mindset helps in adapting to the changes or bringing changes to existing life situations.

The list may go on and on.

Now, if you’re not a person who is involved in some kind of business activity, then diving into marketing concepts deeply at the beginning is not a good idea. Because it can create lots of confusion and may affect your current decisions badly.

Instead, ask yourself how many points you find relevant in the above list. Then begin to observe their presence in day-to-day life. This will help you to measure your interest level in marketing subjects.

As a next step, you can continue your learning through dedicated books, blogs, or videos based on your interests and requirements.

Remember, 99.99% of the time you’ll find marketing information from a business point of view only. That’s why I’ll try to share such information in a customized way for nonbusiness persons in the journey of growth.

Now let’s look at some of the FAQs.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Conclusion

Well, You and I have looked at the necessity, important topics, simplified ways of learning and sharing, and their connection to growth.

To sum it up, defining what is growth in life for oneself is the first and most important step.

Then finding new and unique ways to learn relevant subjects such as building mutually benefiting connections, communication skills, moderate usage of online tools and platforms, and understanding the basics of (modern) marketing is highly useful for present and future growth.

What are your thoughts on this?

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