I was originally going to call this post School’s Out Forever and you’ll see why in a minute, but I opted for a more descriptive title.
This post has been rattling around in my head for a while and to be honest the subject is so important that I assumed I must have already written such a post in the past.
After checking I realised I hadn’t, so now’s the time to get stuck in and get it all down in writing for you to benefit from.
Let me start by sharing a common trait amongst most unambitious and unsuccessful people in this world.
The End of School or College
Those who think that their days of learning were over the day they left school or college are very unlikely to achieve anything worthwhile in life. There I said it.
This statement has the potential to offend some people, but I’m not worried because I know that if you’re reading this then you’re not one of those people anyway.
The key point here is that the day you left school or college was just the beginning, just the tip of the iceberg.
Hopefully when we leave school most of us can read and write. We also a little knowledge about a bunch of subjects, much of which will be useless in later life.
There are still large holes in our knowledge though in some key subjects. These holes remain because school let us down. We have to fill these for ourselves or forever live in ignorance.
Money is one example. Lack of financial education is something I have written about before so I won’t repeat myself here. But it’s probably one of the first areas you should brush up on. Whatever your age it’s never too late.
For the record I’m not a conspiracy theorist but I do believe that schools deliberately keep us in the dark regarding money.
The reason being that governments want us to pay as much tax as possible with as little resistance as possible. There’s no better source of income for them than millions of financially unintelligent tax payers.
They don’t want us to be too financially smart and asking too many questions, they just want our money and I guess you can’t blame them.
General Knowledge is NOT Valuable
Now that’s off my chest, let’s talk about knowledge which really is valuable.
Those of us who went to university (myself included) will acquire some specialised knowledge in one or more specific subjects.
That’s a good start because specialised knowledge can be very valuable, general knowledge usually isn’t. When was the last time you saw a job interview that required good general knowledge, probably never.
Let’s be honest, a load of general information is now available on the internet and with the aid of Google you can find the answers to most questions in seconds.
I’d go as far as to say that general knowledge is near worthless nowadays. Again, might offend some people and I am biased because my general knowledge is quite poor.
However, unless you’re well into pub quizzes then stay away from general knowledge and specialise in something.
I’ve never been to see a doctor because of his knowledge about 80′s pop music. I’ve never hired an accountant because he can name all the states in America.
It’s their specialised knowledge I’m willing to pay for. I use Google for the rest.
Your Real Education Starts Here
Having established that school let us down, that general knowledge has very little value and that specialised knowledge can be very valuable then hopefully we now have a direction.
We need to begin our real education when we leave school or college and we need to start learning about specific subjects which have some value to ourselves and others.
Start with your financial education as this is one of our most important subjects and it’s one where school let us down the most.
Your education isn’t a destination, it’s a journey and it should last your whole life.
Lifelong learning is imperative to your success, especially in this fast changing world. With advances in technology this is particularly important.
For example it was impossible to teach me about the World Wide Web when I was at school, because it didn’t even exist back then. Had I not continued to learn myself I wouldn’t be writing this right now.
There’s no excuse for not subscribing to the idea of lifelong learning. There’s so much information available now on the internet and most of it is available for free.
Blogs, podcasts, audiobooks, video, forums, eBooks, iTunes U, the list of free resources goes on. Even a lack of time is no longer an excuse, you can listen to audiobooks and podcasts while you exercise, cycle, drive, vacuum, almost anything.
If you read this far then hopefully you just learned something new and enhanced your business mindset, but let this article be just a small part of your lifelong learning journey.
Many thanks for your time, I realise this wasn’t a short article. Feel free to comment.
