In this episode, we discuss the importance of learning the right things to make you successful.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, where my goal is to give you 10 minute lessons on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones.
In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about the importance of learning the right stuff. We all can go to school, but that doesn’t mean we’re getting the education required to be successful in the real world. Mark Twain said it best when he said: “Don’t let your schooling get in the way of your education.” In today’s world, your degree is not going to be enough to be successful since 15% of your success is due to your technical competence and the other 85% is due to your human engineering, the ability to negotiate, communicate, and lead. So you need to know the book smarts along with the street smarts.
I believe an education should teach you how to make a better decision in your life. You could get an education in history that focuses on world war one but you need to be able to apply those lessons today’s problems. Once I understood the main points of economics and public health, I realized that I need to figure out some sort of program that I could apply to problems that people have outside of the classroom. Then once I got into the workforce, I realized that I am going need more skills than I learned in college and is a reason why I took improv classes, I took a storytelling class, and I went to a networking workshop. Learning these skills outside of the classroom, have been so much more beneficial to me in terms of my personal growth.
With improv classes, I had to do uncomfortable things and I paid $240 for the six-week course, so I wanted to make sure I got my money’s worth. You can easily get an education and coast your way to a degree if you do the bare minimum. But there are also those people who got a 2.00 GPA and are millionaires because they understood the human engineering part of life after school. So we should do things that are going to help us a person that will make us wiser. You learn to get wisdom, so you can develop better strategies for your plan. If you can’t come up with a good plan to improve your life and you have a master’s degree, then you let your schooling get in the way of your education.
I remember there was one girl in one of my English classes back in college and she got really upset that she had some corrections on her paper and was saying that’s what she learned that how to write that way in a previous class. She probably learned something but it might not have been that great. Also, she probably didn’t understand that other people have other expectations. I think the best thing to do for the person was to let go of what happened in the past and ask what needs to be done to do a better job with her papers. But overall she let her schooling get in the way of her education. I feel bad for her but life throws curve balls at you and you have to prepare for them.
Another thing I see is that people treat education as a check in the box. This can be a very expensive mistake. If you graduate from college with $30k in debt and you pay off the loan in ten years, you will pay roughly $39k for that education at a 6 percent interest rate. If you take 20 years, it will cost you about $51k to pay off that student loan. If you’re not using that education that you just made a $39k mistake, plus you can’t forget about the time you lost that you could have been working on something else. You could have taken this time to learn other things that would help you out in life. I am a big believer that you should take a personality test and find out what type of careers fit your personality like Strength Finders or Meyers-Brigg. Then find a mentor either in real life or virtual and don’t underestimate the power of virtual mentors that you can learn from books and videos and how they became successful and see what is necessary to be successful. I really hate that we have to make such a financial decision at such a young age and it can really affect you. So keep the end in mind and don’t make a decision that is going to affect you negatively.
We can easily get caught up in what we want to do in life. I thought I wanted to become a physical therapist and so I started to take classes that would help me get into physical therapy school but I didn’t realize what that process entailed. When it comes to physical therapy, I thought I was going help a lot of athletes but what happens is that most of your clients will be senior citizens and I’m not that passionate about helping senior citizens versus the youth because the youth is our future and a stronger youth, will mean a stronger future. Then I didn’t do very well in chemistry and was not that interested in chemistry and I ended up getting Cs. I think I lucked out with my public health degree because it allowed me to think about behaviors and how they are the major cause of chronic diseases and how our environment shapes our behaviors and that you need to think how things are interconnected with each other and if you fix one area, you probably need to fix six other areas. Then I was able to get an economics degree and was able to use supply and demand to understand how the world worked. In my financial planning profession, I am able to use both degrees to make me a better financial advisor and that’s because I paid attention in class made sure I was getting my money’s worth. You can spend too much time trying to get an education and then fail in implementing the tools. So the biggest thing we can do is take action on what we learn and make sure we are not fooling ourselves in what we know and need to know.
Thanks for listening to today’s episode, to recap just make sure you don’t let your schooling get in the way of your education. It can set you back in terms of money and time and we should strive not to be wasteful of both.
To get a free copy of my book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to get better every day” just go to my website growwithjoe.me/book and just pay for shipping and handling.
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