Educate yourself

Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought.

Napoleon Hill

Too many people think that being educated can be achieved by attending school and college and collecting diplomas and degrees.

Education is something that happens inside your head, it is something that you have to actively work on. You have to educate yourself! education is not something you can recieve by sitting in big rooms with hundreds of people and by memorizing facts that are considered worth knowing.

Instead of teaching kids what to think, schools should focus more on teaching children how to think and they should be shown the beauty of experience and leaning.

The current system fails way too many people. Those people memorize all the required material for years, get their degree but have not learned a little bit.

Ask a student about his first finals. He won’t know a thing, because he learned for those finals, but not for himself. He did not want to understand the content, he wanted to pass the tests. Now ask some selfmade working person about any topic related to their work and they will talk endless hours about it. Our school system makes it possible for people to pass without having learned anything but being good at memorizing.

So do yourself a favor and concentrate on education in your spare time. Go to the library, use the internet, read about the things you are passionate about and try out a lot. Educate yourself and do not rely on your college or your school. Those degrees will matter on your CV at most but personally your biggest gain out of your college time will be friends and a good time, but certainly not a  profound education.

/phil

Problem?

Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.

Hugh Miller

/phil

There’s always something to learn!

We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 – and half the things he knows at 40 hadn’t been discovered when he was 20?

Arthur C. Clarke

Nowadays this seems to be more relevant than ever. Living means learning and making progress!

/phil

Are you sure?

Our vision is more obstructed by what we think we know than by our lack of knowledge.

Kristen Stendahl

There are a lot of things we are sure about, things we won’t discuss because we just know them. But we have to be careful about those things. It is rare that anything is easily classified right or wrong and one should always be flexible and open to change.

/phil

Please fail once in a while

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

Bill Gates

This one is important not to forget!

Success is awesome, but beware of taking it for granted. It lures you into a false mindset of “Nothing can go wrong” and will make your next failure way harder than it actually is.

/phil

Good rule of thumb

Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.

Bill Nye

Well maybe not literally everyone know something you really want to know, but that does not matter. What matters is the idea to listen carefully. Always be open to people and their stories and never think you know enough. Breath information and knowledge like you breath air after a long dive!

/phil

Enjoy life

I find my joy of living in the fierce and ruthless battles of life, and my pleasure comes from learning something, from being taught something.

August Strindberg

/phil

Make use of everything

No experiment is ever a complete failure. It can always be used as a bad example.

/phil

It’s the smallest things that matter the most

Small daily improvements are the key to staggering long-term results.

It sounds so simple and it may be, once you’ve mastered it. But there must be a reason why so many people worldwide struggle with long term growth and success.

They are not capable of daily improvement.

It is not about building a career or a house in one day. It is about you being a better man after every day.

Every night you lie down and go to sleep, you should ask yourself ‘Am I a better man now than I was yesterday?’ and you should answer with ‘Yes I am, because…’.

There is a great range of possibilities for reasons from ‘Today I greeted a stranger with a smile‘ to ‘Today I started my dream job’, it does not matter.

What matters is that you do not stop growing.

Grow everyday and no matter how small the growth may be, in a few months you will not recognize your former self (in a positive way).

Start today and remember: There is no room for excuses in life.

/phil