When you leave school, you step onto a journey to real mastery.
School doesn’t teach the most critical skills.
Most children spend most of their lives in formal education that doesn’t provide the best return on investment.
“Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”, teachers drill into young minds, and formulas to calculate a triangle’s area, two things the student probably won’t use.
The problem is that work has evolved outpacing education.
The majority of education (other than reading and writing) isn’t applicable to raising your income.
The greatest skills that bring a return on investment isn’t following directions.
It’s seeing and solving problems that others don’t.
It’s starting Google because mainstream search engine optimization is frustratingly bad. (Other than duckduckgo, they still are).
Formal education can teach how to follow directions but not how to create value.
That’s a main differentiator between high and low-skilled labor.
In Mcdonalds, employees regurgitate rules. They work quickly but don’t think for themselves, a major determining factor of job happiness.
Detractors of this idea may point to seven-plus years of required education to gain a medical doctor degree, but several years of that is in-hospital experience.
Students learn in the classroom, but doctors can’t consult a textbook while treating a near-fatal gunshot wound.
The most valuable skill in professions is to think on the fly and shift pieces of knowledge for changing circumstances.
You still must learn that knowledge, but most people forget book knowledge if not applied soon after learning.
Hands-on learning is more efficient and requires you to put in the unpredictable hours during which things will go wrong.
Most formal education doesn’t teach you to think on your own because it was designed when job security existed.
You could work for a company for 20 years until you got a pension, doing the same simple work, and growing with coworkers so that your company is almost family.
That’s no more. The future of work is constantly shifting to value creative thinking instead of your ability to follow directions.
Over the next 10 years, every occupation from lawyers to insurance agents will change to be almost unrecognizable.
Don’t get left behind.
The future of work means that your brand and skills will determine your income. Find a rare, valuable skill and master it, whether in a classroom or at your desk.