Imagine If College Taught You How to Make Real Money in Your 20s
Instead of teaching you how to be a slave until you're 65.
I was a terrible student.
I wanted to get to the point and receive real-world tools I could implement straight away. Much of what the education system taught me was theory. No wonder university hated me and threw me around like a rag doll.
My problem with university stems from the cost. It’s simply not worth tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. There’s no way you can put up a logical argument that justifies these price tags. Because the cost is so high we are forced to take out debt to pay for it. This education debt has fuelled a giant bubble in the US at around $1.6 trillion.
This quote from Mr Whale on Twitter inspired the theme of this article.
Imagine if college taught you how to get rich in your 20s instead of teaching you how to be a slave until you’re 65.
I changed the “get rich” part of the quote to “make money” because getting rich shouldn’t be the goal in life. Chasing endless piles of money nearly destroyed my life. Getting rich solves nothing.
Learning how to make money is different. It’s not about making stacks of cash. It’s about how you can make money, why you make money, and using money to buy back time and get closer to some resemblance of freedom to do whatever you want.
Slavery until 65
I’ve been following the education system’s approach to work for years. Here’s what it looks like.
Work flat out Monday-Friday. Eat, sleep, pee, repeat. Waste Saturday trying to decompress. Do housework on Sunday. Then go back and do it all again on Monday and have my labor exploited by a corporation that gets a stupidly high majority of the upside.
The salary I earn at that job has little to no wage growth. Wage growth statistics from Pew Research agree. Inflation then quietly ruins our purchasing power as trillions of dollars are created out of nowhere to fund wars and health crises.
This cycle of modern-day work is expected to continue until I am a 65-year-old cranky bastard with a head full of wrinkles. It feels like slavery. Most of the time I spent working like this was wasted in pointless meetings, being stuck playing office politics, and watching douchebags take home stupidly big bonuses for doing a lot of nothing while skulling back-to-back cappuccinos.
Retiring at 65 is the definition of hell.
65 is when your energy levels start to decline. Why wait until conventional retirement to have fun and enjoy life?
What’s missing from education
Higher education taught me to memorize useless information I can google. Here’s what it doesn’t teach us that could help us make money in our 20s and opt-out of corporate slavery.
How to face rejection
Rejection is how you make money. Failing teaches you far better lessons than a textbook that assumes the world is lovely and a rational place to live in.
When you fail in the real world the lesson is burned in the back of your brain. When you fail at education you simply put more coins in meter and buy yourself another shot (if you can afford it). I meet nice people all the time on LinkedIn. They want to change their career and make more money. They’re often deathly afraid to try and see what happens. They’re programmed to dislike rejection.
So they stay in a job where they can continue to take zero risk.
Risk equals growth.
I wish the education industry didn’t infect my brain. I took very few risks in my 20s because that’s what I was taught. In my 30s, I got a real education and learned that risks are healthy.
Starting a business is a risk. Quitting a job you freaking hate is a risk. Telling a pain in the ass devil boss that you’re not playing his Hunger Games anymore is life-changing. Taking a leadership role you’re not qualified for accelerates your understanding of how to interact with humans and inspire them to do the best work of their life.
Without taking risks you can’t make more money.
How to skip getting a permission slip
The job description for a career is often misinterpreted by freshers. They’re taught that there are rules and minimum requirements. A job ad is a nice-to-have list of nothingness. Most people don’t comply with their job descriptions. They just convinced someone they did. Experience is the funniest one.
Experience is massively overrated. A lot of people with experience are simply glorified seat warmers. They know a little about one particular field. They’re rarely challenged so they assume they know a lot and their Microsoft Excel experience will send humans to Mars.
Ditch the permission slip. You can practice a skill for 3 months and be better than someone with 10 years of experience. Time is a bad measurement for education. Immersion and open-mindedness are far better predictors of true learning.
Once you drop the need to get metaphorical permission slips, then you can start getting opportunities that make you real money faster and buy back your freedom sooner.
Some people say they have 20 years experience when in reality, they have 1 year’s experience repeated 20 times — Stephen Covey.
How to build relationships
I had a graduate working with me a few years ago. They were really well educated. We’d have meetings about different business problems. They always wanted to start a debate and prove they were right — and the smartest person in the room.
They were probably right in some of the debates, but they destroyed relationships in the process. Nobody liked them. When it came time to handing out job offers they were one of the few not to get one.
You need other people to make money.
Teachers who’ve done the thing (successfully)
Many of the teachers who teach educational courses haven’t done the thing they’re preaching about in the real world. Even worse, many of teachers have tried to do the thing they’re teaching in the real world and been terrible at it. Yet, they are supposed to tell us how to succeed in life? Makes no sense. Oh, and the lessons cost a lifetime of debt to access.
The money graph we never got in school
I’m doing a Tupac and getting this graph tattooed on my chest.
Traditional education should teach us more than a skill. Education should teach us how to make money from a skill as a foundation. But we need a level two.
The education system needs to teach us how the time we give up is converted into money. The product that is money should be explained to us. Who creates money? How is a war funded? Who benefits from a recession? Why does the stock market boom in America when the economy has been trashed by a health crisis?
The work we do is great. But we’ll be poor and forced to work until 65 unless we’re taught how money works. And an increase in the minimum wage will simply be offset by further devaluing the money we’re paid in. That’s what is missed by traditional education.
There’s more to life than money, obviously. Without time to explore life that is paid for with money, how will we ever find out? We won’t.
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This article is for informational purposes only, it should not be considered financial, tax or legal advice. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.
Hey Tim, I love the way you write. Thank you.
There is a huge difference between Accreditation and Education. The sooner we decouple those from each other, the better.