A powerful strategy for turning your life into a learning, growing process is to live life deliberately as a process of discovery and intention. You can learn about yourself, others, and the world from anything. What it takes to learn is the determination to learn. You can practice scanning events and your response to them with the strong will to see lessons. Each of us lives a life that is incredibly rich in lessons, tailored precisely for us.
Words can be more than just talking about something.
Certain words are actions, not symbols. If you promise something, commit to something, the act of saying or writing the promise is the promising, or at least the formalizing of the commitment. So couple your discovery statements with intention statements. These don't have to be big intentions. Mark you intention statements so you can quickly find them later, to see if you held to them.