7 1/2 Lifelong Learning Habits

I love the idea of lifelong learning. I love to learn new things and to keep my brain constantly engaged. Of the 7 1/2 habits, I feel pretty good about most of them. My best habit is that I have confidence in myself to be a competent and effective learner (Habit #4). I like to challenge myself and I feel as though I can learn anything, if I put enough effort into it.My great challenge, however, is that I am not very good at beginning with the end in mind (Habit #1). Often, I will get half-way through learning something new before I really consider why I am learning it. My goal is usually to learn something completely, from start to finish. But I am often well into the project before I really think about the purpose of why I am doing it. For example, I wanted to learn how to knit so that I could create an afghan for my brother's wedding gift. I learned quickly and got half-way through the afghan before I realized that I could have learned (and probably should have learned) a lot more information before I dove into the project. I'm certainly not afraid to learn new things, but sometimes I get so excited about learning something new that I forget to learn the preliminary items that go along with it. I have to slow down and take my learning a bit slower!