“…true education means mind development; not merely the gathering and classifying of knowledge.” ~ Napoleon Hill
Compulsory education does many things well, but it fails to genuinely communicate the most important lesson to young students—that education is not the memorizing of dates and formulae, but the development of the mind.
Anyone with a healthy brain can cram data into his or her organic repositories. It just takes time and effort to memorize information. But if we look at memorized information, it’s actually not that much different from having reference books on the bookshelf (or your iPhone). It’s considerably faster to search for the quadratic formula in your brain than it is to find the correct page in your high school math book, but unless you want to become an expert at math, it could be wiser to know where to retrieve that piece of information.
It’s never too early to start creating your own portfolio. Whether you’re a freelance web programmer or a student of journalism, you should be working on a portfolio where you collect the best pieces you’ve produced. But if you don’t have a portfolio yet, don’t worry; you can start working on one right now.
Now, why would you want to start growing a portfolio? The fact is that most people don’t have any kind of portfolio until they start actually working in a permanent job and producing results. But the best thing about having a portfolio is, it can tremendously increase your success in getting a job of your preference, and it is an indispensable asset if you’re an entrepreneur.
Landing a permanent job does not mean that you stop learning. We already should know that joining a company is like a direct extension of your previous studies—that’s when you really start learning the ropes. You notice that the college courses you completed were just an introduction to what you would be facing in working life.
And there is always more to learn. No one can be a true master of their profession. If you are a math teacher and have completely mastered the curriculum you are teaching, there is still a lot more to do to improve yourself as a math teacher; you can develop more effective ways to explain difficult mathematical concepts, or you can make your courses more interesting by setting your applied questions in more attractive contexts.
There are a number of ways to prove yourself an expert at something. You can apply for certification at an institute. Winning a competition or breaking a world record will bring recognition and fame. A university degree is a commonly accepted measure of your competence. Also, friends can spread word of your skills. But what if you want to pose the question to yourself? How do you measure your own ability?
“Keep quiet and people will think you a philosopher.” ~ Roman proverb
Do you remember how we, as students in high school, tried to impress our teachers with big long, Latin- or Greek-based synonyms? Even though we were trying to adopt new words into our writing style, it actually brought quite the wrong effect. The lack of focus on content lowered the grade because not only were we overly concentrated on big words instead of writing quality content, the words themselves were often incorrectly placed. Now, I admit that I’m still a beginner when it comes to writing, but I learned a valuable lesson when my English teacher finally smeared my stack of turn-in papers with red ink during my sophomore year in high school.
The same thing applies to every skill in the world. When you flaunt your mediocre skills as if you were a master, the reception will be cold. We humans have an innate ability to detect pretenders. Some people are good at deception, and rightfully so, since they are masters of deception. But most of the time deception fails, and the loud talker only ends up proving how little he knows.
Self-Learner is a blog about self-education and self-improvement based lifestyle design. Goal? To become the best "version" of yourself, and feel excited to jump out of your bed every morning.