Well, I had to quit college after only two years. You see, I owned my own business, one which I started at age twelve, and I was losing money sitting in that darn classroom listening to teachers tell me stuff I already knew or worse things I knew to be false. But how did I know that? Simple, I was out running my business and they were trying to teach me business topics from a book. Okay so, let's discuss all this shall we?
In the Wall Street Journal on October 29, 2012 there was an interesting piece in the "Notable and Quotable" section. Joseph Schumpeter's writing was quoted from his work "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy," published in 1942. He said;
"The man who has gone through a college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual operations without necessarily acquiring employability in, in say, professional work."
Interestingly enough, we have this same problem today, only it is much worse. You see, we've been busy telling our high school students that if they want to be successful then they have to go to college. Thus, those who go into the workforce from high school straight away are automatically "unsuccessful" but this really isn't the case. You see, many people go into their own business or start working somewhere and move up the ranks to management. By the time they get there, their peers in high school are just getting out of college with degrees.
Somehow the kids with degrees think they can start at the top, management level, and skip the grunt work, they think they are above that. Why? Because they have a degree, knowledge and they've been told that "knowledge is power" and you know what; that might be true, but so is experience, know-how, and the wisdom you get from doing, not reading something in a book, or listening to a lecture. What's that famous quote; "you can't learn to ride a bike at a seminar," so true isn't it?
When I franchised my business, I had sold a franchise at the height of the Silicon Valley boom to three MBA students from Stanford. They wouldn't listen to what I had to say, or follow our business plan, they wanted to reinvent everything, after all they were smarter than me because they went to Stanford they assumed. Interestingly enough, my grandfather was a Nuclear Physicist there, and I share his genes, and you know I was pretty smart even back then.
Anyway to make a long story short, they failed in the business. They wouldn't learn how to do the work, they never truly understood the business. They just figured they could apply all their book knowledge and management metrics and "viola!" they'd clean up, literally, as it was a mobile car washing franchise they'd bought from my company.
Maybe some of these kids need to dump this notion that because they have a $100,000 in student loans and a degree on their resume, that they are god's gift to the world. No actually, the man who worked himself up through the ranks is the man to beat, he knows everything about the operation, and anyone can learn that crap in the book, hell these days they have free-business courses and lectures online. Please consider all this and think on it.
Lance Winslow has launched a new provocative series of eBooks on the Future of Education. Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank; http://www.worldthinktank.net/
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