Life often leads us in many directions. That has certainly been the case for me and our family. This variety has served up so many valuable learnings. Here is how I experienced it:

School days: Youth groups, football (soccer) and cricket - the value of friendships, collaboration and teamwork.

Late teens: Rotary Exchange - how and why living in another country changes your mindset.

Tertiary education: Learning how to think comes first. Technical skills (in my case, statistics, economics and business principles) next. How to apply these skills follows.

Main career (Market Research and Consulting): Continuous learning is essential to career advancement. Reading books and articles, podcasts and videos, as well as seminars and conferences. I am amazed how many snippets of information I recall from time to time that originated from 21 years of attending marketing and research conferences.

Emigrating to Australia: Arriving in a new country with no business or personal network required resourcefulness and a thirst for local knowledge.

Second Career (Commercial Hydroponic Tomato Grower): Learning how to grow 5500 tomato plants and harvest 25 tonnes of snacking tomatoes a year was challenging. The best source of guidance proved to be developing a network of experienced growers.

Third Career (Artisan Chocolaterie Business Support): During more than five years selling artisan chocolate at farmers markets we interacted with thousands of people. We learned a huge amount about human nature and the buttons to push. We also learned about the success factors in online marketing (more than half of our sales were online).

Fourth Career (Web Development): The learnings are endless - from the creative and technical side to the motivations behind a client's need for a website.

For a large part of this time I found that my interests provided learnings much larger than the interest itself. For example, flyfishing - "outwit the fish, don't just throw out some bait", and golf - "when you take a pill, don't swallow the whole bottle".