It’s hard to avoid the reminder that learning never ends, or to miss the advice to continue learning all of one’s life.

My guess is that it has been put out there to reassure us or to motivate us in times when learning doesn’t feel like an easy thing to do.

The ideas themselves are not really necessary, because humans are wired for growth. There are at least two reasons I can see why it is so.

The first is that we are wired to sense danger and pay attention to it. It’s the result of being a species that seeks survival. For us, it means that we constantly learn to address and prepare for danger.

The second reason is that we are social animals. Belonging to a group means that we’ll seek to strengthen the group, it’s how together we find solutions to establish more safety for the individual members. In modern times, it is comfort and performance more than safety.

It’s how being wired for growth allows us to develop a sense of safety, or confidence, through the strength, or skills, we developed.

Being wired for growth doesn’t mean that we’ll always do it or that it’ll always be an extraordinary performance. Nature also teaches us to rest, but most of the signals we learned related to the need to rest come from physical labor. And physical labor is the very thing our civilization is reducing where it can.

We provide ourselves with extraordinary powers, but most of them are external to us, designed to ask less of our own physical strength.