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Pursuing Career Success Without College – Why should you learn on your own term?
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Let me suggest something that will save you both time and money, and will also probably save you some headaches that come with a heavy load of invented schoolwork and student loans too! You guessed it right- DIY. Many successful people were self-taught, rather than an MBA graduate. Such as Bill Gates, Andrew Carnegie, Abraham Lincoln, Ted Turner, Steven Jobs, and many more. Just type “Self Made Entrepreneurs” into Google and you will find a ton of self-taught success examples. To be honest, do you really believe the academic trainings or career development courses that are heavily advertised will make a real difference to the bottom-line of your job? Getting more education from the established, big name institutions will make your resume look good, and therefore increase your competitiveness in terms of climbing up the ladder. However, at the end of the day, how much impact is it going to have on your work on a daily, practical basis? It’s hard to generalize, but my advice is that you’d better be very sure you’re getting a lot of value for your dollar when it comes to formal education. It costs a lot, and it’s easy to be enchanted with that piece of expensive paper too much. My university experience was a blessing, and I can’t deny the benefits I got from the non-academic side of it. Because of tremendous stress and deadlines in school, I learned a valuable, and yet humiliating truth that my stress and time management skills were really bad. However, I didn’t come to a viable solution to that until I’d read the “The 4-Hour Workweek” and heard about how some Internet Marketing gurus managed their time. I was surprised that guru wisdom actually revealed a solution to a long-term problem I had struggled with. I had a lot of questions about how to solve real problems at work. School didn’t provide any direct and proven solutions I needed for the day-to-day demands of the workplace, or for my own business. I was on my own to figure it all out in “the street” school. To give formal education some credit though; the deep and difficult theories and knowledge I learned from school made the technical challenges I faced at work seem like a breeze. Most of my classmates use less than 10% of what they learned from school at work. It was that easy. To look at it from another angle, however, 90% of our tuition was overspent. I was speaking for my program, which was a professional training program, so more educative knowledge was needed. If speaking about most other programs, real life application was much less than 10%. In real life the technical parts aren’t the most difficult. It’s politics, downsizing, job stress , competition, marketing , and bottom-line that are the most difficult, and yet schools don’t provide a lot of education on them. Usually, it turns out that all I need to solve a problem in real life is a simple, out-of-the-box, and trench-proven technique that is readily usable, and cheap too. As for formal education, it cost me $500+ for a college course. When I graduated from the university, I owed the government 30k in student loans. What true education should accomplish According to one of my heroes, Jay Abraham, true education should enable you to achieve the following: In his book, “Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You’ve Got”, he describes some inexpensive yet profound ways you can attain the objectives outlined above. If you read his bio , you will see how he has created extraordinary results for himself, and for his clients in the last 25 years based on these simple objectives, and many others. Although my experience was trivial compared with Jay’s, I could identify with what he taught on a smaller scale. I’d only read his book “Getting Everything…” recently, but some of the techniques that he described I had already utilized before, without being consciously aware of them, and the results were great. For the times when I wasn’t smart enough to do things like that, I was bogged down by “problems, obstacles, limitations, or boundaries”1 like everyone else. For more information, please read the book “Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got”. It’s worth every penny. How do you get Advanced Career Training for Real? According to Jay, the key is to stretch yourself beyond your comfort zone - always be ready to reach out for ideas and answers. Pay attention to breakthroughs and innovations that are constantly happening in every industry and market. There are all kind of significant books written for every single subject. There are proven, innovative, and groundbreaking ideas you can instantly borrow from someone else right now. Your competitors might still be ignorant about something that is common as dirt in another industry, but will instantly create multiple folds of rewards if you simply transfer it to your field. Doing so requires a mindset that is opportunity-focused – always aim for new and better ways to conduct every single action – no matter how small it is. You can go to a major bookstore and simply walk the aisles to get a sense of how other people and organizations have achieved success and growth. Visit conferences and read magazines such as Forbes, Inc. and Technology Today. How to prevent information overload and learn in a time-effective way There is too much to learn, and too little time . One effective method to save your time is to pick the top 2-3 experts in the field who have walked their talk. It’s easy to verify their backgrounds, achievements, or references/testimonials. Never put your trust in someone without proven qualifications and a proven track record. Another way to save time is leveraging on word of mouth. Visit online forums and visit relevant blogs to hear from people who might know more about the subject. If you have no clues about which book to get, which expert is trust worthy, or what kind of information you really need for your particular problem, forums or blogs might give you useful hints and recommendations. This was how I came across one of my life-changing books, “The 4Hour Workweek”. Buy only books that renowned experts recommend. Read autobiographies of people who have done what you want to learn, not biographies written by speculators. Before you decide on buying a book, visit Amazon.com to double-check its reader reviews. Our generation is overwhelmed with tons of information. At first glance you might not know where to start and what to choose, but fortunately, real experts befriend other real experts, like attracts like, and useful information usually creates some buzz and word of mouth, so there is a web of connections which you can use to dig out the real deals. Harvard Business School for $99 If you pay for Harvard, you’re not spending just money on tuition, but also 4 years of your time on the whole package of university related activities such as moving into town, socializing with school buddies, walking in and out of classes, juggling with minutiae and financial problems, etc. What if you can extract the essentials of Harvard, filtering out the hassles and minutiae, for just $99 a year? One of the main reasons behind Harvard Business School’s success is its real-life case study based curriculum. The case studies reveal plans and details behind the business practices from hundreds of companies. You can find a case study on any business subject for less than $10 a piece. Or you can buy a Harvard Business Review package for $99 a year. If that is not enough, you can go online and read articles written by professors from major business colleges around the world. Swift and Direct Vs Indefinite Swelling of Complexity due to Procrastination Life conspires against us. It shoots us with non-stop rapid rounds of errands, urgencies, and complications that get in our way to the important goals. As if it’s not enough, we have trained our minds so well to invent tasks that make us busy. When we feel stressed, we procrastinate with unimportant, urgent tasks. We excuse ourselves from the main objectives with red tape and bureaucracy. We suddenly need a cup of coffee, or search for something when we are about to start something that truly matters to our work or business. According to Parkinson’s Law, “work expands to fill the time available." The more time we’re given for a project, the more work we will come up with to fill that time. The later the deadline of a project is, the more complex our minds will make that project to be. The problem with typical jobs and career training is that we have too much time to fill. A job usually has an 8 hour workday (studies show that the amount of time an average U.S. worker spends on real work is 1.5 hours per day). A career related training course typically lasts from 4 to 6 months. As per the Parkinson’s Law, our colleagues, teachers, and ourselves will naturally match the time with invented work, homework, discussions, paperwork, and so on. As of this writing, I am probably guilty of that too. I have to continuously remind myself to limit the time I spend on this site to a laser-focused, purpose-driven, and limited number of hours each day, in case I lose focus and get distracted with unimportant research, analysis, or brainstorming. Funnel, refine, perfect, and streamline every action you undertake to make sure it is the most effective and direct step toward the end result. If more people do it in a consistent manner, more people will graduate from college/university before 16, become an executive before 25, or retire before 30. Leap-Frogging to the top instead of collecting expensive degrees and serving your dues Social conditioning has influenced us more than we realize. We feel safe to climb up the ladder incrementally, but are afraid, or dare not to think about the possibility of leap-frogging to the top right away even if our skills meet the requirements, or if we can acquire the skills rather quickly. We worry about what other people think of us if we don’t serve our dues, and climb up like how everyone has done it. We let the experts, professionals, or the general consensus determine how much time we’re supposed to serve before reaching our destination. For example: the black belt of any martial arts, a college degree, a coveted managerial promotion, a business breakthrough, and many more. In the about me page , I mentioned how I ran for a prestigious position of the student government, against all odds and expectations, during my university years. I wasn’t welcomed by the inner circle of student politics, because they thought I lacked experience. After campaigning for only two weeks, I won the election that took stronger candidates years to acquire experience and network for. Prior to my success, everyone (me included) had always believed the myth that the candidates had to have tons of experience and connections to win the election. Apply the Leap-frog mindset in your job, education, and everything else. Focus on finding the most profitable and effective way to do things, instead of following the herds, or the predecessors. Don’t let colleagues determine whether you deserve it. Don’t let naysayers get in your way with uninformed nay advice. Remember this: most of the time there is only a handful of elites who’re constructive to your causes, the rest are herd people who will try to convert you into mediocrity. Action Steps: Make sure you bookmark this page, and subscribe to my newsletter for more quality content and updates.
Reference 1-4. Abraham, J. (2000) Getting everything you can out of all you’ve got. Return from Pursuing Career Success Without College to Homepage
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