Entrepreneurship, Startup founding and investing in Startups is the best way to inject yourself with a steroid for meta-learning and self discovery. If you want to learn about yourself then you should definitely become an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship and Startup Founding is a truth game. It shows what you are made of with all the warts and all. I am constantly asked why I continue to work on all the things that are related to Startups, Founding, Entrepreneurship and building a sustainable startup community in Iceland. I have not found a better Meta-Learning process of self-realization than the journey of building companies, investing in startups and creating value.

So what is Meta learning? Meta learning is an awareness and understanding of the phenomenon of learning itself as opposed to subject knowledge. There is a whole study of Meta Learning and references in wikipedia. As I mentioned before, I have got hooked into Tim Ferriss’s Meta Learning mania. For those of you who read this blog regularly, you know that I am always referring to books, because I believe books are the ultimate tools of learning. You can literally understand and learn about anything as long as you have an open mind and some critical thinking. I have just gone and ordered a whole set of books as a gift to myself. I will write in detail about each of the books, but I want to take one book and describe the story behind why I bought this book.

I got into Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge to do my Masters in Economics. I had always known, since I was 12 years old that I would do my graduate study in America. When I was about to leave for the U.S (there is an interesting story behind how I got the U.S. Visa but that is for another time), my cousin sister was very thoughtful and gave me a small cooking booklet that she wrote for me. I mean, it was brilliant, she had basically broken it down to make the base sauces for literally every dish and how to add layers to make each dish taste different etc I used the book without realizing that was meta learning. Understanding how to cook by breaking down the process to the bare necessities and then describing the process. I was a hero in my apartment for the first 2 weeks, my roommates enjoyed my cooking. I was not particularly interested in cooking so I pulled a Tom Sawyer on them. I cooked for 2 weeks and after that I did not cook for the rest of the 3 years I was in school. They all got so interested in cooking that I never had to cook. It was brilliant. Now that I have been doing a lot of research on food, diet and everything else in-between. I am once again getting interested in cooking. Tim’s writing about diet, body and food has rekindled my interest in cooking as I once felt when I got into my first apartment kitchen in Baton Rouge. Cooking is so fundamental to our being. I don’t know how I have been so blind to this. I want to get really good at cooking so I bought the The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Tim Ferriss and I am going to dive into cooking.

I believe what is true for startups is also true for everyone of us. Startups=Growth, if you are not growing then you are dying. All of us have to face death but I am more interested in learning and experiencing life. Life is short, so are you learning and growing?