What have I been doing with my life?

I've accomplished my major project for this year: I've turned 40 a few weeks ago. No, I'm not going through an existential identity crisis. I did look back at my professional activities and saw a clear unifying theme that I'd like to explore more in the coming months.

I tell myself I'm now having both the shade of grey and the age number where people start believing me... Let's find out if that is indeed the case :-). And no, I didn't find myself a 20 year younger partner, I'm not driving a convertible and I didn't sell my goods to help the children in Africa... So far my midlife crisis has manifested itself in building the Simpsons Lego house (ah, sweet childhood revisited!), and playing the Stick of Truth Southpark x-box game.

Professionally, in the 94 days between this and my last blog post, I've 'only' concentrated on my core job of creating development experiences for leaders at a variety of ye typical big companies. I did look back at my side-projects over the years, and I discovered they are all centered around the theme of "self-directed learning" (or self-regulated learning, or self-organised learning environments, or DIY learning or however you want to call it.)

• At some point I wanted to find out for myself what web 2.0 really meant, so I created a web 2.0 site from scratch - learning to program in the process. The result was the quiz site www.about2findout.com (I think the site must be down now, I didn't look at it for over two years). That experience taught me a lot about how I develop myself and how I am an like to be a "serial learner."
• I wrote a book Homo Competens - about competent people in the network age. It took me a year to write it and to come up with the Learn-Do-Share principles. The book implicitly assumes people can and should drive their own development, how that is in this time and age more important than before, and lists a variety of activities to do so.
• I've spend a year immersing myself in the world of Quantified Self - a bunch of people that track what they do, and learn and change based on this instant and personal feedback. Of course, I was in it for the gadgets too :-).
• Last year I did my most rewarding, most massive and most exhausting side-project to date: I was one of the drivers of LeaderMOOC. Arguably, to survive a 'MOOC' you need as a participant to drive your own learning process more than in any other type of formal learning event. We also found out that MOOCs work for topics that focus on behavior rather than knowledge, but not for everyone.

I'm very happy that an opportunity came along that will allow me to focus my attention on this underlying theme even more, and that will allow me to crystallize my thoughts around it. I've been asked to conduct a workshop at the next Corporate Universities and Corporate Learning Summit in Brussels at the end of June. The topic of my talk is Self-Directed Learning under the title "All we really need is us".

I'll be covering more on Self-Directed Learning in my next posts. And now that I'm 40 and have the right shade of grey hair, you'll believe me, right? :-)