The late Bruce Lee once taught us to be like water: formless, fluid, and flexible. I would echo his teaching while also adding a bit of my own: be like a sponge. As a sponge absorbs, it grows. My advice to you is to absorb everything.
A couple of years back, I took a semester off of school, went back home to California, and worked as a mason to earn some money. There I was, a junior in college studying advertising, taking a semester off so I could work a job in construction. That might seem like the biggest waste of time. Trust me, that thought crossed my mind more than once. But as I settled into the idea of working construction for four months, while I could have been doing an internship at an advertising agency instead, I decided that I needed to make the most of it. I had to ask myself as I worked, “What can I gain from this experience?” Now I’m not talking about money. In this case, I’m talking about knowledge and skills. I broke my back every day cutting rebar, stacking bricks, mixing cement, and building walls all while being yelled at by a foreman. Though it was rough, I ended my time there with a much better work ethic. This job had taught me, quite literally, how to push through the dirt and filth in order to create something beautiful. You better believe that a skill like that comes in handy when working in advertising, graphic design, or even writing your first blog post.
Now, not everyone needs to stop what they’re doing and go grab a shovel. But the point is that we are all put in situations that we either want to be in or would prefer not to be in. So why not make the most of those non-preferred situations and actually try to learn from them? We choose whether to simply go through the motions, or to take something out of the experience so that it can be applied to something completely different and unrelated in our lives.
I made it a goal to start absorbing everything, whether it’s at work, while reading a book, or even talking to a friend. I constantly ask myself what I can absorb from any given situation. I stopped reading books only to be entertained, but also to learn. I take notes, annotate in the margins, and mark the spots I love the most, so I can return to them in the future. By the time I finish reading a book I want it to look like it was jumped by a gang of highlighters and sticky notes. Even when I sit down to watch a movie or a TV show, I try to think of what I can take from it. I mean, even Walter White has some redeeming qualities that we can learn from. I don’t live just to be entertained, but to absorb so that I can grow.
What is the point of doing anything at all, if we are not going to take something away from it? Next time you are in a job that you aren’t too fond of or tasked with doing something that you would rather not, don’t turn your brain off and wait for it to be over. Do the opposite. Absorb. And next time you are reading a book or sit down to watch your favorite show, do the same. Absorb. Be like a sponge, my friend.