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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.

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 Good Business Owners Live Disoriented

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There is such a strong pull in our western business culture to ‘have it all figured out.’ But there is a simple, counter-intuitive yet powerful principle that successful business owners know which keeps both them and their businesses growing:

Adults don’t learn unless we’re disoriented.

Think about it. A kindergartner is learning all the time, but adults have it all figured out. Why? Because everything is new all the time to a five year old. They are regularly amazed by how the world works. But adults have it all figured out, even when we don’t. We can’t let anyone know we don’t know something.

Successful business owners aren’t afraid to not know something and the best of them simply “live disoriented”. If we know that we don’t know everything and that life is SUPPOSED to be full of change, healthy instability and new experiences, we are much better prepared to grab hold of the new things that will keep us and our business fresh and growing.

Most business owners are strongly fastened to what they’ve always done, so when something new comes along that would actually push them forward they don’t see it because they aren’t disoriented enough to see the opportunity – they already “know” what works.

When I was in my 30s and had been in business a few years I figured I knew at least 50% of what it meant to be a good business owner. A number of businesses later I was much more certain that I knew less than 25% of what it took to make it work.

Business owners who live disoriented understand that the more they learn, the less they know. Learning just opens up door after door that all provide opportunities for us to continue to grow, adapt, change, and succeed.

When was the last time you were disoriented? Unless you’re disoriented from what you are certain is “true”, you’re not likely to take on any new tools to help you be even more successful.

Bob Parsons (Parsons Technology and GoDaddy) says: “Get out and stay out of your comfort zone.”

Let’s all commit to being five years old again – get disoriented and stay that way. You’ll learn a lot more, be a lot more successful, and make a bigger splash in the world around you.

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.

Act your way to a new way of thinking – get disoriented.

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Bob Parsons of GoDaddy says simply “get and stay out of your comfort zone”. I agree and would add that adults don’t learn unless we are disoriented.

When we believe we ”know”, that is when we stop learning. We must be disoriented from the comfortable zone we live in.

Learning is helpful, but teaching is usually a waste of time. Teaching is someone filling my head with information when I’m not disoriented enough to learn. Learning is me filling my life with a new way of living.

We do not think our way to a new way of acting.
We act our way to a new way of thinking.

Our education system has it backwards. Therefore, give people new ideas when they are in a place that they want to learn them and they will stick. ”Teach” them the same ideas when they are not disoriented from what they already know in their heads about the subject, and you’ve both wasted your time. The old adage “more is caught than taught”.

Business owners best learn and adapt when they are disoriented enough to gain new Clarity (vision for the future – they see it), that brings Hope (they believe they can do it), that allows them to take measured Risk (they will take action). If they have Clarity about where they are going, they will have Hope, and will take the Risk to learn and adapt. Clarity, Hope and Risk.

Healthy disorientation happens best in community. Business owners rarely live in community, but are taught to go it alone, which gives them even less feedback to disorient them, making them all the more sure that there myopic view of the world is just fine.

John Wayne is dead and we should have buried the rugged individualist with him. Get into community, get disoriented from your reality, and keep learning. The more I learn the less I know.