The Relevance of Education: Leaders Are Readers
I was driving our sixteen year old son to high school this morning and we were talking about his favorite subject and teachers. Then I asked how his chemistry class is going. He replied, “Not so good.” After I corrected him on his use of good versus well (clearly the English language can be a challenge for many) I asked him what was going on. He simply said, “It’s hard, Dad.” In the end, like algebra for our older son and many kids in school today, I believe the bottom line is that these subjects lack relevance to their day-to-day lives. Kids don’t get the “what’s in it for me” and it affects their performance.
I am not one to berate our sons when a particular subject becomes too challenging. After all, I was far more interested in girls and sports while in High School, so I can definitely empathize. Math and chemistry lacked relevance for me. And this made getting good grades in these subjects all the more difficult.
While I don’t pretend to have the answers to our current education system, it seems to me that later in life, many people get a lot more motivated to learn. How many people do we know in the ranks of Corporate America who have gone on to pursue a Bachelors, Masters or PhD? The same is true for most of us who work as professional coaches. Education and reading is paramount to our success. The relevance to all of us who stay in learning mode is that getting better educated will translate to more opportunities, more income and a better lifestyle. Now that’s relevance.
I can’t remember where I read this, but the saying went something like this, “Leaders are readers. And readers are leaders.” While I couldn’t stand to “do homework” through High School and College, as an adult in the workforce since 1983, I’ve learned to love reading. My bookshelves are full of books on leadership, management, sales, marketing, and other topics that relate specifically to personal development. Ray Kroc once said, “When you’re green you grow. When you’re ripe you rot.” And in today’s world of the “knowledge worker” it’s absolutely critical to read, take classes, go to seminars, and continue climbing the proverbial “learning curve” whether it’s for an advance degree or not.
I strongly encourage everyone to read something of relevance every day. One of my personal strategies has been to eliminate watching stupid television shows. In fact, I hardly watch anything on television that’s not of educational value. (How did with live without digital recorders? Commercials are the bane of television for me) And when I walk our beloved Labrador Retriever, I listen to CDs that help me learn. When I’m driving in my car I almost always listen to something that helps me learn and grow personally.
So what lifestyle changes have you made or could you make in this regard? Please share your comments with a post on our blog. Some of my coming posts will discuss the many books I read. And everyone here at BusinessCoach.com appreciates your participation here. What are you reading? What are you learning? How is it helping you grow?
As always, warm regards.
Coach Cliff
Comments
As far as reading business books, I have recently read two that I would highly reccomend. What got you hear won't get you there, the best selling book by Marshall Goldsmith and The Five disfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lenceoni. They are both great reads and I have talked to others that agree, Gary Henson
I'm not one of those guys whose espousing that corporations are evil, lifesucking creatures. What I'm saying is that kids don't want to be a cog, they want to own the machine. And they correctly see that the educational system is not going to help them do that. They respect musicians who start their own record labels, basketball players who start their own clothing lines, actors who design their own fragrances, etc. They realize that elementary school, high school, and college are not ideally suited to help them do that (It can, but you have to be extremely deliberate and quite a bit lucky to boot).
As information about the wealth mentality becomes more accessible, beginning with the efforts of industrial era philanthropists, accelerated by the internet, and driven by business coaches like yourself, more and more teens will become disaffected with the message that they need to get good grades so that they can get a good job.
Hopefully, one day I'll get around to retooling the educational machine so that students will learn the skills necessary to be successful business owners and investors, and so that they'll be able to easily see the link between daily instruction and long term goals ;)
"During the 18th century, the Kingdom of Prussia was among the first countries in the world to introduce free and generally compulsory primary education, comprising of an eight-year course of primary education, Volksschule. It provided not only the skills needed in an early industrialized world (reading, writing, and arithmetic), but also a strict education in ethics, duty, discipline, and obedience. Affluent children often went on to attend preparatory private schools for an additional four years, but the general population had virtually no access to secondary education."
No wonder so many of hated school. My humble advice Noah, you have a lot to offer so take some baby steps to affect change in education. You are a great teacher. Teach some classes. Become a coach. Write more.
During that time I have managed to read nearly 1,000 books of various subjects not just business related.
Self education is much more important for personal improvement and we seem to be able to retain the information we acquire much more easily.
I think the saying you tried to remember was To Read Is To Learn And To Learn Is To Lead.
Keep up the good work Cliff, this world needs more people like you.
Warm Regards
James Chapman
Post a Comment