Do I need to read and and study on my own to get rich you might ask? Is it really necessary?
Short answer is: YES!
Long answer is: Yes, please read this article to learn why.
As I have stated on previous articles, most of us during our childhood – and later – we have swollen the blue pill of social conditioning, into believing that money will come from the sky or from a forgotten uncle that will pass away, with you being his only legitimate party of his will. Well don’t bet on that! Unless you try really, REALLY hard, riches you really dream of are not going to come by chance.
The best way to start, is to re-wash your brain by taking the red pill of truth. This pill can be given to you through only two options:
- Self education
- Hanging around with successful people
Sometime the second one takes time, (a bit) of luck, plus you do need to be someone of value, in order for successful people to want to hang out with you. In this article (which I consider to be one of the most useful ones I will ever write), I will only briefly try to explain to you, why formal education, i.e school, university etc, won’t make you rich – ever!
I have narrowed it down to five main reasons. Most probably there are a lot more, but we are going to analyze those five for the moment, which I consider to be the real *wealth killers*. As usually, for the most loyal and beloved of you, I will also provide solutions, on how to kill the dragon.
Therefore formal education:
- Kills creativity and original thinking
- Produces a system of poorly fed rats
- Promotes competition
- Flattens dreams and ambitions
- Lacks training of everyday life skills
Formal education kills creativity and original thinking
In one of the most viewed TED videos, Ken Robinson captures the essence of why schools really kill creativity. Unfortunately, today’s educational system only cares about canned answers and ways to think. Teachers, professors and other professional in the educational field, always choose the easy way to “problem solving”. They teach their pupils that, whenever a problem arises, they should look for a pre-made, canned answer to solve it.
As you can understand, this “boxed” way of thinking may be useful for a few, easy tasks, but it can’t hold a candle when it comes to hard, real life issues, we all have to face at some point in our life.
Let me illustrate with an example. I bet that most of you have already experienced the situation I am going to describe once or twice in your life. What we learn in schools, is that we all need to get good grades in order to find a *good job* – sigh – to support our family. What your teacher isn’t telling you, is that, your future employer won’t give a shit about these (or any other) grades no matter how good they are, as long as you are incompetent to solve a problem on your own and you are constantly seeking for outside help (consuming valuable company’s resources).
Try to counter this, by mentioning one situation your good performance in school, helped your promotion in your current job.
In my opinion, the #1 skill for any employee – not that we like being employees in this blog, but anyway – is to be able to solve problems in a creative, original way, when they arise. Teach a person to think that way and you may very well skip all the stupid, unnecessary years of formal, linear education, learning mathematics, physics etc.
Solution
Always try to think outside of the box. Just because there is no canned answer to a problem, doesn’t mean you can’t come up with an original one (no one have thought before). Don’t let anyone, and I mean NONE (even if it is your mother, spouse or your teacher) tell you there are no more original ideas to come up with.
Original ideas DO exist and they are discovered and implemented on a daily basis by talented people, all over around the globe. Just think of a problem that many people have, and come up with an original idea to solve it.
[bctt tweet=”Original ideas DO exist and they are discovered and implemented on a daily basis by talented people, all over around the globe”]
Produces a system of poorly fed rats
This might sound bad, but, well…IT IS BAD! Possibly the worst effect of formal education, is that it produces a system of the same copy > paste rat. You have seen them before. Odds are, you are one of them as well. Schools, universities etc. are the best places to breed the super rat species in order to run the economic machine as we know it today.
I can’t really think a better way to mass produce, robot employees, than having 30 kids in front of a blackboard, listening to the same blue pill story all day long . Odds for a rat to become excellent (millionaire) are so thin, that I would say, 1 out of 100 rats really stands out to become someone of importance.
The whole thing makes perfect sense, since the well-oiled system does really need, a huge workforce of disciplined rats to run smoothly. To be honest, I am perfectly fine with having rats, but…I don’t want to be one, and neither should you!
Solution
Get off the hamster wheel now!
How do you expect to thrive if you work on a shitty office for 12 hours a day? You only have that much energy and willpower. Give it a thought!
Nobody forces you to remain a rat on a wheel. I don’t fucking care at what age you read this. There is ALWAYS time to make a radical change in your life. Change your job, your friends, your school. Do whatever it takes to stand out from the crowd and live your life by your own means – not somebody else’s.
Formal education promotes competition
What a happy thought this is. Since the beginning of our time (as a species), we humans, survived mainly due to our ability to cooperate on multiple levels. Nowadays, economic machine – remember, the one that produces rats – doesn’t like that. Today’s moto is always about a zero sum game and rarely about real cooperation.
How could it be otherwise, since day one at school kids learn how to compete for achievements, grades etc and rarely learn to cooperate towards a common goal. Things only get worse at universities (especially the high end ones), where competition is at its finest. Only the best student gets a scholarship, a golden medal or the best looking girl. It is the same story again and again.
If you ask me, I am perfectly fine about the best having the best (this is the whole point of this blog anyway), but I get sick every time I see people ignoring the power of cooperation, in order to promote only their own interests. For better or for worse (depending on which side of the rat wheel you stand), formal educational system very rarely teaches us how to seek for win-win scenarios.
Solution
Win-win scenarios is always what we should look for. When I make a decision, whether it is for business of for “pleasure”, I always try to be beneficial for both parties. It will make more profit in the long run even if you can’t really see it at an early point. Competition is only for mindless bullies. Smart decision makers always look to cover their asses and protect the interests of the people they work with.
[bctt tweet=”Competition is only for mindless bullies. Smart decision makers always look to cover their asses and protect the interests of the people they work with.”]
You have heard for sure the paradigm with the sticks before. One little stick can easily break, two is harder and so on. Choose your peers (business partners and long term relationships and above) wisely. They can help you, and you can help them back. Together you can achieve new levels of success, that most probably could not achieve on your own.
Formal education flattens dreams and ambitions
Forget about what I said before about the rat making machine. This is the worst of all. Hands down! Of all the curses this alone kills, a huge potential of the innate greatness in all of us. With no exceptions at all, EVERY educational system, whether being school, university or the army, makes you believe that you have no more potential than the guy next to you.
I have yet to meet one single case of someone really believing in me during my younger years – still this may very well be due to being an average guy myself. Granted that I can’t really remember a case of someone believing in someone else, as well. I can’t really bite it that all the people I have met in all these years, everybody was an average Joe.
There should be some extraordinary ones. Yet nothing. No promotion, on a mental or practical level. We all learn to be the same. No educational system (that I am aware of) will make you believe and pursue your dreams and ambitions. Instead they will make an excellent job feeding you the blue pill of “averageness” during your most sensitive years.
Solution
Don’t be a victim as well. You don’t have to kill any of your dreams. Anything is possible, as long as you believe in it. Who is your teacher to tell you that you can’t make millions. Most probably a really under-paid rat, that can’t see further than his nose.
If your goal is to be a millionaire or to fuck models, it is entirely in your hand to achieve this. Just break the process into smaller pieces/sub-goals and try to make one step at a time. Eventually you’ ll get there!
Formal education lacks training of everyday life skills
Another biggie. I wasn’t really curious about it during my child years. But eventually it hit me in the head. What the hell do I really need history, astrology, poetry, arts etc? Courses like these don’t add a single bit of value to my life. Period! I am not saying that we don’t need any of those, but studying about a stupid war that took place a gazillion years ago by someone to conquer something (mind you: which most probably is a propaganda book, written by our own government) won’t help me a tiny bit to achieve my goals, any time sooner.
Real life skills and problem solving are crucial weapons in order to survive and thrive. General knowledge about poetry, arts and history is – good to have knowledge – as long as you have a tone of spare time and you want to cultivate your cultural background.
Solution
I have to admit, this is a hard one. Since school will fill your kid’s head with a shit load of useless information. I have really thought about it in the past. Only feasible solution I have found is to let my kid go to school for a few years in order to learn the basics. That would be some basic mathematics, the native language, plus a couple more languages, and that’s it.
Rest of self-education should be about:
- evolutionary biology
- anthropology
- applied psychology
- social skills
- money making
- networking
- critical thinking
- problem solving
That’s it. As long as my child learns about these things, I believe he/she would be able to cope with most of the situations life will throw at his/her face and thrive!
Conclusion
Just to make this clear. I don’t blame formal educational systems for all evils on this world. I can’t entirely blame our schools and academics for hungry black kids in Africa (although it has to do with it at some level). All I am saying is that formal education systems don’t make champions. You cannot expect you or your children to become an exceptional individual based on school’s and universities’ arsenal.
Champions leverage their own self-education in order to achieve top performance. They try to squeeze every drop of healthy mindset from people they know their stuff. They try their best with laser focus determination towards their goals.
If I have not convinced you as of now, at least give your children or your self a fighting chance by starting to read and educate yourself on your own a lot! This is possibly the best single piece of advice I can give you today.
*For a more in depth analysis, have a look at The Education of Millionaires, by Michael Ellsberg.
Can you think of any other ways, the formal education system of your country sabotages your potential?
