Self-Education Over Standard Education.
Mark Twain wrote, “I have never allowed my schooling to interfere with my education.” As a young man, I once thought that if I got all my schooling completed, I will become educated and I will be able to do everything I needed to do with an education. What I didn’t realize then is that there are different types of education. I got my first associate degree from North Lake College, in Dallas, Texas in the summer 2006. I felt so big and euphoric to the extent that I started feeling myself. I was talking to myself inside and telling myself “now you are a college graduate and are better than many people in the world who don’t have an education like you.” Little did I know that little knowledge is so dangerous to the mind.
Afterwards, I had realized nothing in me had changed other than the certificate on the wall. Then I told myself that I will seek more schooling to see if I will feel more educated and thus more valuable both intrinsically and extrinsically. In May 2007, I received my next degree and I started to evaluate myself again to see if I was any better. I thought I will grow but then it was just the same way I had felt the last time I got my other degree. I had continued to accumulate diplomas on the wall and even though I had too many degrees, I didn’t feel any different.
By the time I got my second law degree, I wanted to see if I could write better and sound educated but I realized my vocabulary was as rudimentary as it was when I started college. At this point in my life, I was struggling in every aspect of my life. In 2014, I went to an MBA information session at the University of Minnesota. I wanted to get an MBA in Finance to get better and improve my financial skills, but the price tag was so high. I left there so disappointed. I was not willing to borrow $90,000 just to improve my financial skills.
Two years later, my life took a turn for the better, and I started to look for solutions to all those areas I was struggling at. I started to read books to educate myself in all the areas I wanted to improve. I started studying successful people. I started to read leadership books, psychology and financial books. One day, I was listening to a lecture in my car and the guy said, “if you read 50 books in one area of study, it is the equivalent to having a PHD in that area.” After that, I was hooked and started to read every book I could find on finance, leadership and psychology.
The more I read and took notes, the more I got interested in what I was learning and how it was improving every part of my life. I started learning behavioural science on my own. Now reading has become my mistress and sometimes I feel like I am cheating on my wife with these books, sometimes I leave the house to go somewhere, and I sit in my car reading for hours until I realize what I have been doing. So far, I have read more than 50 books in leadership, more than 100 books in personal development, psychology and behavioural science and more than 50 books in financial literacy and money matters. I once read a quote somewhere that said, “your real education starts the day after your graduation.”
Sometimes I wish I knew what I know now early in my life before I even started college. I am not regretting because everything that happened to me happened for a reason and it happened for me because I learnt tons of lessons that made me a better human being. Because of what I have learnt through that process, I will never stop learning until I die because as Sydney J Harris said, “the whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.” As I try to learn every day and continue my education many mirrors become windows for me to open and try to escape there and realize there is a whole different world out there that I was not aware of.
Through this process, I have learnt that I know nothing about nothing which confirms that timeless quote by the Greek philosopher Epictetus who said, “a man can't learn what he thinks he already knows.” The moral of this story is to let you know that you can learn anything you put your mind to, whether through school education or self-education. You just have to make up your mind. Socrates noted that “people learn more on their own rather than being force-fed.” You don’t need anyone to force you to learn. Not your mother, not your father nor your teachers but by yourself through your initiatives not for what you will get at the end but for what it will make you, “an educated man or woman.”
The importance of becoming an educated person is this, an educated person will not ask for power but will take it without asking. It was Nelson Mandela who said, “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” He didn’t say the gun, or the sword is the most powerful weapon but education, and for that matter self-education. He used what he learnt in prison about others, their culture, customs and their poetry and literature to unite his country and avoid a civil war.
Malcolm X had a third-grade level of education when he went to prison but came out educated and affected the whole world with his ideas. He armed many of his black American people with intellectual curiosity and taught them to think differently for themselves. One of his most famous quotes about education said, “education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” That statement is so profound that it gives me chills all over my body every time I read it. That person is self-educated in the four corners of a prison cell and when he came out, he shook the four corners of the American fabric and become a force to reckon with.
This article is not against standard education but to encourage you to combine your standard school education with self-education. No school is going to teach you who you are and what you are capable of achieving in life. You have to start where you are and find all the keys to every door and look for all the mirrors to every window. Use what you have because you have enough to unlock every door of every potential you have been given. Do what you can with what you have and do not stop pushing and turning those keys until every door opens and every mirror turns into a window of opportunity.
Ahmed A Madey
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