Business

Make The Ladder

In the United States, and perhaps around most of the civilized world, mainstream children are told similar things. 

Parents almost give them check-lists of a sort for their perceived version of success. 

They tell their children, to

• Go to school
• Work hard
• Get good grades
• Get into a good college
• Get a good degree
• Find a good, stable job with good benefits, pension, etc.

They don't know, however, that this may be the most destructive advise of all. 

Billionaires such as Bill Gates and creator of Facebook, Mark Zukerberg are practically advocates to impressionable teenage minds to drop out of college or high school and fulfill their dreams. 

This would not be my particular advice either.  

There are a few things that distinguish Zuckerberg and Gates from the general populace. They had drive, genius, and the education to make it happen. 

While they didn't formally graduate from college, they were still educated. For example, Zuckerberg was a programming prodigy before college. He was a genius, no doubt. But genuis in of itself is not useful without education. He learned programming and eventually became one of the most well-known people in the United States. 

The purpose of Education is first and foremost to learn. This is a fact that I believe is understated nowadays. College degrees become less and less useful per day. The system is failing. 

It seems the main point of going to college is to get the degree, not to learn. The degree is meant to signify the level of knowledge obtained, however, that level is lessened each and every day. Students put themselves in overwhelming amounts of debt to attend a school, then they don't receive the quality of information they should, but are okay with it because their future employer, if they can find one, will only see the degree and the university attended. 

To go and get a college degree for the degree's sake is a perversion of the education system and eventually the global market. 

Because of this system, we have under-qualified individuals working in crucial positions of the financial, political and economical sectors. It is a recipe for disaster. 

The best advice I could possibly give, is to study the financial basics for personal use. Whether or not there are really any good, stable jobs left, people have a tendency to get themselves into major amounts of debt because of the lack of financial and economic knowledge available to them. 

The next piece of advice I could give, is to really learn your trade. Make yourself indispensable and if possible, create your own business from there. Do not go to work to make money for someone else, or even for yourself. Make money work for you. Don't try to work yourself up the ladder. 

Make the ladder.  

Create more positions, more jobs, improve the economy and make yourself rich. Don't settle into bed with fear and the most important thing, no matter what you do, never, ever say I can't. Figure out solutions, brainstorm, never stop thinking. Because the moment you say I can't, is the moment when you won't ever be able to.