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Education: One of the Business Diseases of the Industrial Age

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Day 14 of 21 days with Chuck’s new book, Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea

The uneducated (those who learn without school) are, by almost every measure, doing much better than their mortar-boarded friends. Our Industrial Age education system would like you to believe it’s not true, but the fox is guarding the hen house.

Before the education system, us uneducated folk were doing just fine. In the early 1800s Noah Webster (spelling book), Walter Scott (novels) and James Fenimore Cooper (novels) sold five million or more copies each to a population of only 20 million, a staggering 80 million books each in today’s numbers. Even though their prose was complex and highly allusive, this makes them the three best selling authors in history by far.

In 1840, before compulsory education, 90% of northerners and 81% of free southerners were literate. By 1850, it was closer to 97%. In 1852, Massachusetts passed the first compulsory education act, requiring everyone to attend public schools. Nearly 80% resisted. The Barnstable parents were over run by militia who marched the children off to school under guard. The education elite justified it by saying, ” In too many instances the parents are unfit guardians of their own children. The children must be gathered up and forced into school”. Industrialists always believe people are stupid and lazy.

At the time, literacy in Massachusetts was 98%. Today national literacy fluctuates between 60% to generously 80%, depending on whose statistics you follow.

Get a High School Degree – Become a Fortune 500 CEO
A recent survey said “the school of hard knocks”, featuring CEOs who dropped out or never even attended college, was the number one source of CEOs of S&P 500 companies; not Harvard.

Drop Out of High School Or College – Get Rich
Forrester says a stunning one out of five of America’s millionaires never attended college at all, and a much higher percentage never finished. 63 of the top 400 richest Americans never finished college and half of those never bothered to start. With Bill Gates out of the equation, billionaires with only a high school diploma are worth an average $5.3 billion, while billionaires with a PHD are worth $3.2 billion, and those with a bachelor’s, $2.9 billion. Dropouts and non-attenders do the best by far, even without Bill Gates.

Beware – Finishing College Will Make You Miserable
If you measure success by personal well-being or happiness instead of money, a study has found that completing a university degree leads to lower levels of happiness for 23 to 25 year olds, compared to those 23 to 25 year olds who instead got an apprenticeship or vocational training.

Good Luck Learning Something In College
If you measure success by sheer learning, a third of college graduates gain no measurable skills during their four years in college.

High Schoolers Work The Hardest
If you measure success by productivity, only 59% of high school graduates waste time at work, compared to 66% of those with a bachelors, 65% with a masters, and taking the top spot, PHDs at 67%.

But College Grads Make a Million More…
And finally, if you measure it by salaries, high schoolers win there, too. “College graduates make a million dollars more in their lifetime than non-college graduates.” It’s an urban myth perpetuated by education junkies and an education system that needs your money to keep it afloat.

In a classic “fox watching the hen house” study, Georgetown University released a study in 2011 that the media intelligentsia loved. But the college junkies didn’t bother to look closely at the facts and how Georgetown avoided them.

Let’s Leave Out The First Seven Years
The report didn’t measure any earnings before 25 years old, lopping off seven years of earnings for high schoolers while their college counterparts are going backwards into debt. Let’s not start the clock at the beginning of the race; we won’t look as good; a ridiculous omission that invalidates the results right out of the gate.

Let’s Use Bad Math
The study also just piled up this year’s earnings 40 years in a row on top of each other, which skews the numbers in the favor of what they are selling. But after lying about the $1million number, in small print at the end, they tell you if you use the actual accumulated net worth number that any bank or financial planner uses, the lifetime gap between a college grad and a high school grad isn’t a million, it’s $593,000. Add back in the seven unreported years of income at, say, $45,000, and the gap shrinks to $224,000 in raw numbers.

Let’s Not Mention That College Costs Money
Georgetown also didn’t bother to include the cost of the education itself or the living expenses while there, or the $24,000 in average debt students are stuck with after it’s all over. Include all these and the high schoolers now make more. But we’re not done.

Let’s Assume No High Schooler Saves
The study also doesn’t bother to compute in the money saved by those not attending college. If the high schooler or their parents put even half of it in the bank instead of spending it on college, 40 years later it puts the high schooler way ahead, by hundreds of thousands.

Let’s Ignore That The Product Is Not Delivered 33% Of The Time
And then there is the rest of the untold cost story. The Georgetown study doesn’t address the inconvenient fact that 30 percent of college students who get loans drop out, with only the debt and no degree. At for-profit universities, it’s a staggering 50 percent. Any other product would be under federal investigation for non-delivery at these rates.

College is a cost in search of a benefit.

Let’s Ignore That The Highest Growth Jobs Don’t Require a Degree
And finally, Georgetown conveniently left this out – you don’t need a degree to get hired. 18 of the top 24 occupations with the largest expected job growth through 2018 will require no four-year college degree, including the top seven occupations on the list. This doesn’t even include the idea of starting your own company or working for yourself – that’s #21. Most of the remaining six highest-growth occupations, which are at the bottom of the list, will still accept people without degrees who have learned the necessary skills in other ways.

Industrialists Run The Schools
Industrialists run our school systems. Just like Wall Street titans, these are people who want to dominate and be the only players in town. They want to keep a closed market, they resist change and progress, and they see innovators as a “competition” and a threat. Educators fulfill at least four of the six attributes of an Industrialist, and you only need to fulfill one of them to wear the label “Industrialist”.

Fortunately Their Time is Very Limited
I predict the university system and the compulsory education system, as we know them today, will largely be dismantled in the next five decades, and replaced with “education technology”, locally, in the homes, and online. It could even happen well inside 15 years. It’s already well on its way.

The Industrial Age is receding behind us like water receding behind a broken dam. And as it does, the legacy school systems that were developed specifically to feed the Factory System are being exposed below the water line. They are rusty and full of holes, and in most cases simply resting on the bottom, unable to move.

The compulsory education system and most of the universities were boats built for another time, and the farther we get from the Industrial Age, the more obvious it becomes. As it does, the pressure on one of the last giant monopolies of the Industrial Age will grow, until once again the small and local learners take over and rebuild the great learning opportunities that have alluded us ever since we made education mandatory.

This is a summary of a chapter from Chuck’s new book, “Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea (And Other Business Diseases of the Industrial Age)”. Click here to pre-order this new ground breaking book at a discount on IndieGoGo.com until July 28.

Sorry – College Won’t Make You That Extra Million Dollars

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Then what does?

Which one is true? A) Going to bed with your shoes on gives you a headache. B) Ice cream increases your chance of drowning. C) College will make you a million extra dollars over your lifetime.

The answer – none of them.

False Correlation – People who go to bed with their shoes on, have the greatest risk of waking up with a headache. However, most people who go to bed with their shoes on are drunk. Drinking gives you a headache, not shoes.

False Correlation – Every year, drowning deaths and ice cream consumption both dramatically increase and dramatically decrease together in a very tight pattern. The real correlation? Ice cream sales go up in hot weather, and so does swimming. Swimming increases drowning, not ice cream.

False Correlation – Kids who graduate from college make a million dollars more on average than those who don’t’s missing from the correlation? Kids who go to college are motivated to succeed. Personal motivation causes success, not college.

All three of these false correlations can be disproven because lots of other things could lead to the cause. Headaches are caused by all kinds of things. People regularly drown who had no ice cream. And people are happy and succeed in life all the time without going to college. A true correlation to make would be, “Motivated kids are more successful than unmotivated kids.” That one would stand up universally.

Correlation Is Not Causation
To correlate success of any kind, monetary or personal, with college, we have to identify a cause that can be attributed to college. Colleges are very careful about how they word the million-dollar thing. They NEVER say, “Graduating from college will CAUSE you to make a million dollars more than if you just got a high school degree.” Why? Because the correlation doesn’t exist, and they know it. They’re just hoping you will draw a false correlation because they put the words “college” and “million” in the same sentence, like headache with shoes, and drowning with ice cream.

In my new book, Why Employees Are Always a Bad Idea (out in 6-8 weeks), I debunk the million dollar myth. At the VERY best it’s a couple hundred thousand, but it’s more likely a minus hundreds of thousands. But if that distracts you, then for now, go ahead and assume college kids make TWO million more, because the correlation between the money and college just isn’t there.

If there is any advantage a college kid has over a high school graduate, it wasn’t because of college, but because of the kid. They were more motivated and that is what made them more money. College had nothing to do with it. The kid would have been successful no matter what path they took.

What Causes Success?
One out of five millionaires never finished school. More Fortune 500 CEOs never got a degree than from any one university. The richest cohort in America (one out of seven billionaires) are non-college grads. 23 to 25 year olds who did vocational training are happier than 23 to 25 year old college grads (recent study).

If the correlation was between college and success, then we wouldn’t see such ongoing, regular success with no college degree. These people aren’t statistical anomalies, freaks or exceptions. Nobody can explain away one out of five millionaires, one out of seven billionaires (and the richest of them), or the biggest group of S&P 500 CEOs, as anomalies.

Want to be successful?
Then be motivated. You can go to college, too, if you want. Or not.

The 2nd Most Important Business Word You’ve Never Heard

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Wouldn’t it be great if…?

All too often I hear people say, “I got it”, when everything about their actions says differently. The process of truly getting it is much deeper.

Today, education means getting something into your head. Learning, in it’s traditional form, means doing and being. Education is what a PHD gets. Learning is what an apprentice does.

Notice the difference – you “get” or obtain the first one, you “do” or become the other one. One fills your head, the other one fills your heart, your hands, your life and your wallet. Learning takes four steps, but education is set up to take us through only two of them.

Step One – Hear
William Glasser says 10-20% of what hits our hearing actually gets to our head, and almost none of that gets any farther to actually change something. Hearing is the worst way to learn anything, but is the most common form of education. For college students, itting through canned lectures is what makes Thursday night drinking attractive.

Step Two -Head
Cognition rarely becomes conviction. A very small percentage of what gets into our head actually makes it to our heart as information that we believe can actually make a difference. Most of college is set up to get things stuffed into our heads, and almost never are we challenged by the orators/professors to build a conviction around the information and go do something with it.

Step Three – Heart
A small percentage of information that goes into our head actually stirs our emotion and creates the desire or conviction that we should do something about it. Who challenges us to take the information and use it to be transformed? This is the kind of thing that happens in life, but almost never in education.

Step Four – Hands
While information is rummaging around in our heart, we’re all excited about applying it to our business or our life. But then we get back to email, the phone and the ongoing Tyranny of the Urgent, and the “feeling” goes away. Nothing has changed. Only when we hear something and the information goes from our head, through hearts and out our hands, will it ever make a difference in our lives. Which bring me to velleity.

The Second Most Important Business Word You’ve Never Heard
Velleity is the 2nd Most Important Business Word You’ve Never Heard. (See the first here – http://chuckb.me/x2) Velleity means, “The desire, with no intention whatsoever of doing anything.” Velleity is at the root of the common wishing and hoping phrase, “Wouldn’t it be great if…?” Velleity is something getting all the way from our ears through our head into our heart, but never coming out our hands. We get excited, but never doing anything about it except wish…”Wouldn’t it be great…?”

Doing vs. Knowing
The Greeks (and our education system) were both wrong. We do not think our way to a new way of acting. We ACT our way to a new way of thinking. Want to change something in your life? DO something different. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of velleity.

From our ears, to our head, through our heart and out our hands. Step Four is what creates success. Before that it’s just wishful thinking.

Thought leaders, aren’t.

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Thinking isn’t results.

Why would anyone want to be known as a “thought leader” – for thinking? Thinkers are rarely leaders, so why do we use that term to identify people we believe are leading? There is a better term.

I’m not against thinking, I’m against elevating it to the highest status and the object of our affection. It’s not the lead actor – it has a supporting role in getting results.

Thinking is really important in the process of doing. As I’m moving forward, if I’m not thinking about all the feedback I’m getting I will just run into brick wall after brick wall. But the objective of thinking should be to create a result – to transform something.

So it makes no sense to me to call people “thought leaders” as if they are actually creating change. To call someone a “thought leader” is to focus on the process instead of the result.

Why do we celebrate thinking over results? I believe it’s because cognition, or thinking, has gained an inappropriately high status in our culture. The academics have taught us to assume that thinking is the result, not just one step in the process of getting a result.

Is this just semantics? No – there is a significant difference.

A thought leader is someone who has an idea. A results leader is someone who has changed something.

Thought leaders are educational. Results leaders are transformational.

Results leaders make history. Thought leaders write about them later.

We don’t think our way to a new way of acting. We act our way to a new way of thinking.

It is the act of acting that changes us, not the act of thinking. Nobody learns to ride a bike by reading books.

Einstein also believed we have given cognition too much credit. He said “rational thought” is the “servant of intuition”, but that we have “created a society that worships the servant and has forgotten the gift.” Cognition is simply one of the servants of getting results, and as such we should be focused on the higher value of results, not on thinking.

Many people we identify as “thought leaders” are really “results leaders”. We need to give them their just recognition and relegate thinking back to it’s appropriate role as a SERVANT of the result, not the object of our affection.

Let’s celebrate and promote “results leaders”. Thinking isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

What do you “think”?

Education Is Not Important For Success

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Learning is not education.

Sitting in a hotel lobby in Martinborough, New Zealand after a bike ride, two professors from Vancouver asked me if I thought education was important for success. They hit my hot button. If, like the old saying goes, knowledge is power, then librarians would rule the world. They don’t. Something else is more correlated to success than education.

Millions of higher degree recipients make less during their careers than people who dropped out of high school. And millions who never finished high school make huge impacts and a lot of money.

We miss cause and effect all the time. As an example, people love to say, “College graduates make a million dollars more in their lifetime than non-college graduates.” Is it because they went to school, or because they are motivated to do anything that will make them successful? I think it’s the latter.

If they were told they needed to apprentice with a businessperson they would do that instead of getting an MBA (that would be my advice). They are motivated and committed, and will do whatever they have to in order to be successful.

There is some clear correlation between education in the hard sciences (pharmaceuticals, engineering, plumbing, etc.) and success. If you violate hydrology ($%@* flows downhill), you’ll make a lousy plumber. But there is little correlation in the soft sciences. People build committed communities all the time without ever taking a sociology course. Others help people get past their bad habits without ever taking a psychology course.

Business is one of the soft sciences where education is least correlated with success. Dropouts from college (or people who never went) start hugely successful companies all the time. “Is college necessary?” is becoming a mainstream question.

What makes business owners successful? According to research, education doesn’t show up in the top five. (Entrepreneurial Intuition, an Empirical Approach, La Pira, April 2010), but these do:

  1. Seeing the big picture – being a visionary is most important. If you can’t see it, you won’t shoot for it.
  2. Speed of Execution – taking action while others are researching.
  3. Never giving up; being the bull dog; finding a way to make it work.
  4. Being a life-long learner.

Learning is massively different than being educated. Education fills our heads with information, while learning transforms our lives and the world around us with grounded and applied intelligence.

If you want to have your head filled with facts, get an education. It you want to learn, change lives and/or make money, you’re better off apprenticing with someone who’s done it. They won’t try to educate you, they’ll just make sure you are effective and becoming something you aren’t, yet.

The Greeks were wrong.

We don’t think our way to a new way of acting; we act our way to a new way of thinking.

Go do something with someone who’s already done it; and learn from their experience.

The Vancouver professor’s responses? “Check, please.”

Why You Didn’t Learn to Run a Business in School

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“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” ~Albert Einstein

Centuries of academic emphasis on “teaching” (which fills our heads) instead of on learning (which fills our lives) has left us more proud of our ability to reason than of our ability to know. Knowing flows from learning, which goes to our heart and our life. Reason flows from teaching, which goes to our head.

We’re taught not to know, to not be certain of anything. Knowing is, in fact considered narrow-minded, arrogant, and dangerous. Reasoning is considered open-minded and allows us to fool ourselves into doing nothing for extended periods of time because we are “thinking about it”. Intuition is considered foolish, dangerous, reckless and knee-jerk, while rationality is considered wise, safe, sensible and measured. Apparently one of the greatest thinkers in modern times, Einstein disagrees. So do I, and I’m no Einstein.

The ancient Greeks had two words for knowledge; Gnosis – knowledge of the head, and Epignosis – knowledge of the heart/life. A friend of mine, Doug Root, had a conversation with someone recently who rewound the well worn tape, “Knowledge is power”, which really means “head knowledge is power”. Doug’s intuitive response was dead on, “That can’t be true, because if knowledge was power, librarians would rule the world. Knowledge isn’t power, execution is power.”

Teaching comes in a classroom from books and much too often, from people who have experienced very little of what they are filling other’s heads with. Teaching is about information that goes into my head.

Learning comes from doing, from the classroom of life, and from people who have walked that road before you. Learning is about knowledge that comes out through my life. Knowledge of the heart and life comes from intuitive and conative experience (see last week’s blog on Conation – The Most Important Business Word You’ve Never Heard), and forms the basis for wisdom. Knowledge of the head comes from cognative and rational teaching, and forms the basis for expertise.

Which would you rather have help you with your business, someone with expertise or someone with wisdom? I want the guy who has lived it, bled from their mistakes, rejoiced in their victories and has truly “learned”, not just been educated.

With all the emphasis on teaching, education, reason, rational thought, information and “open-mindedness”, I can tell you as someone who has walked the road and bled from my mistakes, if you want a successful business, you can’t afford to rely on the rational mind. You must DO things first (conate), learn things in the real world (make mistakes), draw conclusions from your experiences (have a bad plan you are totally committed to), and know for certain what works and where you are going – which is knowledge of the heart/life.

The really successful business owners all have a few things they know for certain and are fully committed to. They aren’t open-minded about these things at all, and that knowledge comes out in their successful businesses, not in a 3” binder gathering dust beside their “shelf-help” books.

What do you really “KNOW”; what have you DONE, EXPERIENCED, AND LEARNED from that are making you wise in the ways of business?

Stop trying to become an expert. Expertise will only confuse you, because there is no end to the head-knowledge you could gather. And in the business world, confusion is just a form of victimology; “As long as I’m confused or don’t have all the information, I’m not responsible to do anything.” The endless pursuit of information will not get you there.

You don’t need to be dead certain of a lot of things. That mindset can keep you from learning other things you’ll need to know. But you do need to be dead certain of a few things that no one can talk you out of, that drive your business forward with clarity, hope and risk.

Where is your business going? What does it look like when you get there? Intuitively, what do the next few steps look like? Are you completely and totally committed to a very few things that are driving you relentlessly forward? He who aims at nothing hits it every time. What are you shooting at?

“In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” Eric Hover

Learn a few things by doing them and living them out and use them to build a successful business. Honor the gift by moving forward intuitively and use the servant of rationality to learn from those experiences. You’ll make more money in less time.