How to remain illiterate after graduation

As a little child, you’re a curious being, you’re an experimental scientist. You wanted to learn, you wanted to research, you wanted to know. You love education. But one day, you were taken to school and a teacher started telling you that what education means is for you to cram what a teacher teaches you and write it back to her during a test or exam. By the time you’re done with schooling, you honestly think that you’re educated. SCAM!!
Sometime ago, I watched a TV show where Americans were asked to recall any books they read, just any book. Out of about 10 persons surveyed on the street, I think only one of them was able to remember the name of a book he read. Americans really tried. Here in Nigeria, only one out of a thousand ever read a book once they leave school. Somehow, when people go to the university and graduate with a degree, something in them tell them that they are educated, so if you’re educated why bother reading books any longer.
Certificates can really deceive you.
At some point, I started wondering; why do we judge people by the decorated paper they are carrying. Why do we think someone is smart or educated simply because he has a degree which is a mere paper. I believe so strongly that the number one evil in our educational system is the certificate or degree. Because people are given this decorated paper, they somehow believe that education is in the paper. The implication of this is that students in school study not because thay want to learn but because they want the paper, and immediately after they get the paper, that’s the end of education. If you think this isn’t true answer this; why is it that most people stop reading immediatetly after they leave school? The reason is that they think they’re already educated since they have the degree.
The true education.
For more than one decade now, I believe that school doesn’t give education. Instead school indoctrinates. School teaches you what the industrialists want you to know. School teaches you what the politicians want you to be. Let me explain; there was no public school in the world for the most of human existence. What we know as public school today is less than 2000 years and the foundation is greatly questionable. What we know as public education was greatly influenced by 3 powers; the spiritual leaders, the industrialists and the politicians. And as you may guess, the industrialists had the last laugh because they have a lot of money to influence the system. Do you wonder why you are programmed to be an employee? Do you wonder why you are only encouraged to be like everyone and do what everyone does? Well, your education was never important to the founding fathers of the school system. What they want to achieve was to make you a labourer, and as a labourer, you don’t need to be creative or even educated. Just know how to obey orders.
Degree and the jobs
Until recent time, the university degree is required by every employer on the planet. But that’s changing so fast.  For example, I’ve been in a company where nobody was ever employed because of their degree. Education to me is about self development. Education is all about skills. Education is all about what you know and what you can do with what you know. Education has nothing to do with the degree or certificate. I believe so strongly that one of the ways we can have a better education system is by destroying every certificates in our schools. If students know that the employers would judge them by what they know and by the solution they can provide, they’ll get the true education, and even after they get the job, they will continue getting education because they know that they must increase their value before an employer promotes them. I think that trend has started already.
According to Glassdoor, most fortune 500 companies like Google, Apple, Starbucks, Microsoft etc no longer employ on the basis of certification. This trend is gaining momentum worldwide. Come to think of it, does the degree of anyone solve problems in the workplace? Hell no! What solve the problem are people’s brains and this requires constant education.
Education is not the degree, neither is it the university you attended. Education is learning and knowing. It is what you know and the problems you can solve with what you know. You can’t stop getting education because you can’t know all you have to know about life. If you stop learning after school, you’re an illiterate! If the last time you read a book was the time you had exam, you’re a stark illiterate!
Education outside the walls
Don’t be decieved that education lives inside the four walls of the school. The real education is outside the wall. Your observation of the world around you, your curiosity to question things and find answer, your eagerness to know about money, marriage, relationships, humans, leadership and life in general , that’s education.
Which book are you reading now? Which book did you read last month? Which audio book do you have on your phone? How many educative blogs do you visit? The school programmed you to believe that once you have a degree, you’re educated. But the truth is that the day you stop getting education is the day your brain cells start shrinking. You ought to be improving your mind everyday. Education is a constant learning and improvement of your mind.

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School na scam! How true?

The above mentioned statement has taken a cliche status and is very popular among young people nowadays. A lot of people think that being studious is a waste of time and effort. Is that true?
In my opinion what I consider as a waste of time and effort is going to school without purpose. Most young people go to school because they major in certain subjects or because their parents or friends told them the course to study. Sometimes they make choices based on where they believe the jobs are. One thing they fail to do is to know who they're and what they want as individual. They have this illusion that a university degree is a golden ticket to success. That is totally wrong.
Sometime ago I read on the social media that a number of S&P 500 companies no longer hire exclusively on the basis of university certification. Why is that?  It is because they know that they need talents and good people. Certificates don't guarantee these qualities. Having a certificate does not make one a great employee, it doesn't make one a high performance individual. There are so many other factors involved.
For those that would like to venture into business, I think having a firm grasp of these areas of study is essential
Accounting - the ability to read and interpret financial statements
Economics - knowing supply and demand factors and market trends both at national level and global scale.
Marketing, even though a lot of marketing texts out there are outdated, but it won't hurt to have the basic knowledge.
Communication - how to effectively transmit your ideas to others and get the desired response.
It is equally important to learn how to work on different projects with different class mates, learn how to coordinate and be a good team player.
It is not degree that makes people successful but the knowledge and skills accumulated through school. Equally, there's need to have a plan to develop and continuously hone your skills that would provide the capacity to become better individuals and more competent persons. Thinking that a degree is all you need and that after school, there's no need to learn anymore, that's a big problem. That's the wrong expectation.
Finally, if you want to be successful, have it in mind that schooling may stop but learning is a continuous process.

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Emotional side of investing

There are two parts to the decisions we make. The first part relies on knowledge, fact, logic, and what we would call common sense. The other, relies on other intangible things like emotions, intuition, fear, worry, hope, and feelings generally.

Whenever we are torn between making a decision that splits us between our ‘brain’ and our heart, one has to give way – and logic isn’t always right. Investing is an emotional business. It requires setting asides our hard-earned funds, and the emotions that come with possible losses can lead us to making biased decisions.

An active investor has to deal with a myriad of different emotions as he follows the market and watches the rise and fall (volatility) of his investments. These emotions range from fear/anxiety, investor expectation, overreaction on pieces of information and even stress.

They can be so pronounced that even an experienced investor with a well laid out investment strategy can still fall prey to emotions overriding rational thinking or logic. Here are some elements that propel emotional investing.

Information

Investors typically get information from many sources. They could be mainstream sources like the news or could be entirely based on public speculation. Investors can get lost in the multiple sources of information and make biased decisions.

In fact, because no market has perfect information, the information received would almost always not be credible and will ultimately not matter. Acting on such information and seeing it go wrong would force yet another emotion that can ultimately make the investor completely uninterested in investing altogether – regret.

Another way information can go wrong is when investors try out new investment areas because their friends or family members have tried it and it worked. Great opportunities might be too good to be true as they would ultimately carry more risk than the investor can handle as the basis of their exceptional returns.

Risk

No investor wants to lose money; as such, where an investor notices a downward trend, he or she is sent into a frenzy of panic. Investors need to have risk and their level of risk tolerance in mind before buying into stocks or investing in securities altogether.

Investors who are conscious of the risk factor from the onset can curb the effect of emotional investing by remaining within a comfortable risk threshold. A great way to mitigate the possibility of emotional investing or making biased investment decisions because of the emotions attached to risk, is to seek out ways to mitigate risk.

A properly hedged investment strategy would keep the investor generally relaxed and open to carefully assessing market volatility. Another great idea is to invest only funds you can afford to do without for the longest period.

The moment your investment becomes an important source of personal income, chances are that you would react emotionally to changes in the market.

Investor Expectation

Another reason the investor begins to function emotionally is that his or her expectations do not match the flow of activities in the market. Every investor wants to make money from his or her investment by way of investment growth.

The challenge comes when the investor is fixated on a certain degree of growth based on market indices, timing strategies, trend analysis and other forms of analysis. When things seem to go awry, the investor loses track of the goal and becomes impulsive.

While these are just some of the reasons investors bring emotions into the investing game, emotions cannot be eliminated form investing. In our next post, we would explore specific ways of managing emotions while investing.

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