How Unlearning Can Keep You Relevant

We must regularly look for areas to unlearn, relearn, and breakthrough.

Unlearning is the process of letting go, reframing, and moving away from once-useful mindsets and acquired behaviors that were effective in the past, but now limit success. 

Unlearning is not about forgetting or discarding your knowledge—it’s the conscious act of letting go of outdated information and making space new ideas to inform your decision-making and actions.

Relearning means using that new information to take new, uncomfortable steps that will help you get the breakthroughs you’re looking for. 

I believe that facing these challenging circumstances is when most of our growth happens. But you have to have the humility to recognize when your existing behavior and thinking is stalling your growth—when it’s time to unlearn. 

How to Start Unlearning

The simple answer is to start with yourself—notice the areas where you’re struggling or feeling uncertain in your life or work.

We all know that product features have to be continuously updated and innovated to stay relevant in the market. It’s the same for us humans—we have to update our perceptions, our knowledge, and our behavior to stay relevant in our market. 

Identifying What You Need to Unlearn

We’ve all been going through major changes, the likes of which we’ve never experienced before. Maybe it’s a change in how you personally work, or something as large as your strategy to keep your business alive.

Whatever your situation, if you sense it’s time for self-assessment or you might need to switch it up, ask yourself these questions:

• Where have you not been living up to the expectations you have for yourself or achieving the outcomes you’re aiming for?
• What situations are you struggling with or avoiding?
• Where have you tried everything you can think of to solve a problem, but you’re still not getting the breakthrough you’re looking for?

The answers to these questions can provide important signals for what you need to unlearn. 

I regularly find that the best unlearners are people that cultivate certain characteristics within themselves that allow them to continuously adapt to changing circumstances.

Although there are many such characteristics that help the process, I believe there are really just five that make the biggest difference: curiosity, ownership, commitment, comfort with discomfort, and creating safety. 

1. Curiosity

2. Commitment - Unlearning requires commitment, because you’re going to have to do things that you’re not good at and tackle more and more difficult tasks to truly unlearn. 

3. Ownership - When you don’t get the results you’re aiming for, what’s your usual response? People who are great unlearners own the results. Because they come from a place of truth rather than ego, they want the real information to make better decisions—not to cast blame on others. 

4. Comfort with Being Uncomfortable - Discomfort comes with the territory. Great unlearners consciously go outside their comfort zone and find their edges with excellence to adapt and improve. It’s not always pleasant to go through the unlearning process, but those who persevere are far more likely to succeed and reach the payoff they’re after. 

5. Creating Safety - Start small and focus on yourself. Create safety by taking small steps, safe-to-fail experiments and creating fast feedback loops. That way you can learn what works and what doesn’t as you try new behaviors to grow your capabilities.

Barry O'Reilly, excerpt from:

https://barryoreilly.com/explore/blog/you-are-the-product-how-unlearning-can-keep-you-relevant/

The Netflix Controversy

Netflix is an internet entertainment service that offers movies and television series to subscribed members. It was founded in 1997 and has now around 150 million subscribers worldwide. Since the early 2010s, Netflix also took an increasingly important role as producer and distributer of films and TV series. The rise of this player bypassing traditional channels of distribution of audiovisual contents has generated several controversies.
 
Attacking theatrical release windows
 
For decades, the movie industry has relied on a system of release windows; movies were first released in movie theatres, for around 17 weeks, before being available for sales in VHS or DVD. As Netflix became progressively a major film producer and distributor, it has been at the forefront in attacking this system. Netflix movies have had limited theatrical releases in order to prioritize the subscribers of the platform. But this move has been met with some resistance in the movie industry. As a matter of fact, the organisation running the Academy Awards considered rendering films with less than 4 weeks of theatrical release ineligible to be nominated for Oscars. That said, in the 2019 91st Academy Awards, the film “Roma”, distributed by Netflix after only three weeks of exclusive theatrical release, received three Oscars. Netflix stated that its aim is to make movies accessible to those who cannot afford to go to a movie theatre or do not have one in their own town.
 
Avoiding corporate taxes
 
A second controversy has risen from the fact that in many of the countries where Netflix is operating, it manages to get away without paying corporate taxes. Despite generating hundreds of millions in revenue in various European countries – for example, 500 million Pounds in the UK and 315 million Euros in France were reported for 2017 – it declares only very little profit, and pays from little to no tax in these countries. Users who subscribe to the service have a contract with a branch of the firm based in the Netherlands. Through this system, the firm manages to avoid paying most of its corporate taxes. Such practices are widespread among large Internet firms. To respond to critics, Netflix stresses that in the countries where it generates revenue it invests in local movie production companies, bringing benefit to the local audio-visual productions.

- futurelearn.com, European University Institute (EUI)

Culture in the Digital Age

Philip Kern (KEA) discusses how different sectors of the creative economy have had to come up with new economic models in order to adjust to the digital era. In the following excerpts, he describes specifically the case of music:

The main impact is to actually facilitate the production. The cost of producing has been reduced definitely. It’s also enables people or artists to produce directly, to auto-produce, to self-produce to be directly in contact with a consumer through digital networks. So definitely the impact has been a reduction of cost of production, the availability of production tools at retail level, even to film, to do audio recordings and to make it available directly through distribution channels.

Of all Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs), music has suffered the most from the digital revolution, being hit by digital piracy, the reduction of physical sales (away from highly profitable retail stores), the development of new distribution channels with different monetisation logics (Apple - iTunes setting the precedent by establishing prices of downloads independently of the industry). This industry disruption is driven by new powerful digital players, the development of new business models and new consumption patterns with the instant availability of music on mobile devices and, most specifically, the rise of music streaming. … 

Taken as a whole the revenue of the music industry has severely declined over the last 16 years, essentially due to the decline in sales of packaged music (recorded music in the form of CDs) - the turnover of the recorded music industry significantly dwindled since 2000 (from EUR 32 billion in 2001 to EUR 13 billion in 2014 – worldwide data). The recent 3.2% increase in recording revenues (in 2015) should, however, be noted. The boom of live music and digital sales has not yet compensated the lost sales: digital sales represented EUR 1.3 billion for EU markets in 2014. …

Artists have suffered from the industry’s painful restructuring and have been forced to adapt to a new landscape. They are playing a greater role in fighting for consumers’ attention by making use of new online tools, notably social media, to develop a fan base and attract the attention of concert venues, festivals, and music businesses. However, user-generated content has not replaced artist-generated content, since consumption of music remains talent driven. Artists are confronted, on the other hand, with the fact that the new generation of music fans are less loyal to given bands or music genres switching more easily than former generations. …

Nowadays artists have to make more efforts to emerge by developing a fan base, thus forcing extensive touring, which contributes to a thriving life music scene (concerts and festivals). Artists have to develop a fan base if they hope to achieve a record deal or to be able to feature in music festivals. Social media are important tools enabling artists to develop such a fan base. The direct monetisation with fans remains relatively limited and artists still have to rely on distribution specialists (the record companies) for most of their revenues.

- futurelearn.com, European University Institute (EUI)

The Jobs to Make You Feel Good

Throughout recorded history, rich and powerful men and women have tended to surround themselves with servants, clients, sycophants, and minions of one sort or another. Not all of these are actually employed in the grandee’s household, and many of those who are, are expected to do at least some actual work; but especially at the top of the pyramid, there is usually a certain portion whose job it is to basically just stand around and look impressive. You cannot be magnificent without an entourage. And for the truly magnificent, the very uselessness of the uniformed retainers hovering around you is the greatest testimony to your greatness. Well into the Victorian era, for instance, wealthy families in England still employed footmen: liveried servants whose entire purpose was to run alongside carriages checking for bumps in the road.

Servants of this sort are normally given some minor task to justify their existence, but this is really just a pretext: in reality, the whole point is to employ handsome young men in flashy uniforms ready to stand by the door looking regal while you hold court, or to stride gravely in front of you when you enter the room. Often retainers are given military-style costumes and paraphernalia to create the impression that the rich person who employs them has something resembling a palace guard. Such roles tend to multiply in economies based on rent extraction and the subsequent redistribution of the loot.

Just as a thought experiment: imagine you are a feudal class extracting 50 percent of every peasant household’s product. If so, you are in possession of an awful lot of food. Enough, in fact, to support a population exactly as large as that of peasant food producers. You have to do something with it—and there are only so many people any given feudal lord can keep around as chefs, wine stewards, scullery maids, harem eunuchs, musicians, jewelers, and the like. Even after you’ve taken care to ensure you have enough men trained in the use of weapons to suppress any potential rebellion, there’s likely to be a great deal left over. 

As a result, indigents, runaways, orphans, criminals, women in desperate situations, and other dislocated people will inevitably begin to accumulate around your mansion (because, after all, that’s where all the food is). You can drive them away, but then they’re likely to form a dangerous vagabond class that might become a political threat. The obvious thing to do is to slap a uniform on them and assign them some minor or unnecessary task. It makes you look good, and at least that way, you can keep an eye on them.

- David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

5 Categories of Bullshit Jobs

I have found it most useful to break down the types of bullshit job into five categories. I will call these: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters.

Let us consider each in turn.

 

1. what flunkies do

Flunky jobs are those that exist only or primarily to make someone else look or feel important.

i.e. uniformed elevator operators whose entire job is to push the button for you.

 

2. what goons do

The use of this term is, of course, metaphorical: I’m not using it to mean actual gangsters or other forms of hired muscle. Rather, I’m referring to people whose jobs have an aggressive element, but, crucially, who exist only because other people employ them.

 

The most obvious example of this are national armed forces. Countries need armies only because other countries have armies. If no one had an army, armies would not be needed. But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers. Also, like literal goons, they have a largely negative impact on society. I think almost anyone would concur that, were all telemarketers to disappear, the world would be a better place. But I think most would also agree that if all corporate lawyers, bank lobbyists, or marketing gurus were to similarly vanish in a puff of smoke, the world would be at least a little bit more bearable.

 

3. what duct tapers do

Duct tapers are employees whose jobs exist only because of a glitch or fault in the organization; who are there to solve a problem that ought not to exist.

 

The most obvious examples of duct tapers are underlings whose jobs are to undo the damage done by sloppy or incompetent superiors…… There will always be a certain gap between blueprints, schemas, and plans and their real-world implementation; therefore, there will always be people charged with making the necessary adjustments. What makes such a role bullshit is when the plan obviously can’t work and any competent architect should have known it; when the system is so stupidly designed that it will fail in completely predictable ways, but rather than fix the problem, the organization prefers to hire full-time employees whose main or entire job is to deal with the damage.

 

4. what box tickers do

I am using the term “box tickers” to refer to employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing.

 

5. what taskmasters do

Taskmasters fall into two subcategories. Type 1 contains those whose role consists entirely of assigning work to others. This job can be considered bullshit if the taskmaster herself believes that there is no need for her intervention, and that if she were not there, underlings would be perfectly capable of carrying on by themselves. Type 1 taskmasters can thus be considered the opposite of flunkies: unnecessary superiors rather than unnecessary subordinates.

 

Whereas the first variety of taskmaster is merely useless, the second variety does actual harm. These are taskmasters whose primary role is to create bullshit tasks for others to do, to supervise bullshit, or even to create entirely new bullshit jobs. One might also refer to them as bullshit generators. Type 2 taskmasters may also have real duties in addition to their role as taskmaster, but if all or most of what they do is create bullshit tasks for others, then their own jobs can be classified as bullshit too.

- David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory