To live a happy and fulfilling life, one must continuously learn across different fields. Parents and teachers have limited experience — I spent thirty years learning, yet still lacked practical life skills, often needing to ask online for guidance on everyday matters. We cannot relearn every field from scratch. In 2019, I read Principles and remembered one sentence: Success is fast learning. By 2025, I was finally practicing it.
People need to learn not only how to earn money but also how to make life fulfilling, maintain mental health, and sustain physical well-being. Traditional education overemphasizes books, neglecting mental growth and independent learning. In France, public school students excel at exams but often lack survival skills, whereas students in business or vocational schools adapt to society faster.
For practical examples, take organizing — I knew how to do it, but with a bigger room and more stuff, I became lazy. After taking a course, I realized I lacked “organizing thinking.” Organization itself requires learning. Recently, I started cleaning, practicing categorization, and even read a book about classification and systems, discovering my own blind spots. Finding blind spots is finding new opportunities.
As for why designers should learn “systems,” I will write about it next. Systems determine the kind of work we can produce. Some people succeed not just because of talent, but because they develop their own system — even if it wasn’t learned from theory, but through long-term practice.
