Deep-rooted Barriers: How Formal Education Might Be Subconsciously Limiting You In life.

Bad habits learned at school can become deeply embedded in our minds.

School is supposed to prepare us for later life, yet a large portion of the highest achievers in society never did well during those years.

Gary Vee always talks about how he wouldn’t be able to pass the academic tests to be an employee in his own company.

Steve Barlett, the youngest Dragon on the hit show Dragon’s Den, who became a millionaire by age 23, struggled through high school. Even though he managed to get to University, it only took one lecture for him to make the decision to leave. He ended up dropping out, doing his own thing and becoming hugely successful.

From personal experience, the people I’ve seen do the most with their lives, aren’t the people who were the most book smart at school either — generally speaking.

I know it’s not completely representative, there are plenty of successful people who did great at school. But even in those cases, a lot of them dropped out: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Alicia Keys, Oprah, the list goes on.

Granted, some of them wouldn’t have dropped out if better opportunities hadn’t come up. But the point still remains: This is a system that’s meant to prepare us for success in later life, yet a large portion of the most successful people either hated it or left early.

There’s a common saying, the top A+ students become great employees at top companies. While the D grade students end up running those companies.

Again, it’s not completely representative, but it’s significant enough to make you wonder.

In CASHFLOW QUADRANT, Robert Kiyosaki writes: “I loved learning, but I hated school. I absolutely detested sitting there and being programmed into something I did not want to be.”

In the book, Robert shares some other quotes on education:

Albert Einstein said, “There is too much education altogether, especially in American School.”

Norman Douglas said, “Education is the state-controlled manufacture of echoes.”

H. L. Mencken said, “School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, and brutal violations of common sense and common decency.”

Mark Twain said, “I never let schooling interfere with my education.”

I thought the Mark Twain quote was particularly powerful because it embodies the idea that school isn’t just unuseful for achieving success, it’s potentially limiting.

All those great people who hated/ dropped out of school are avid learners. You’ll struggle to find one successful person on this planet who doesn’t love learning. A lot of them consume information like crazy. So you’d think they would have cherished those school days.

But as Mark Twain suggests, is it actually their love for learning & education that pushes them away from school.

How?

Inhibiting Exploration & Curiosity

Generally speaking, the School Syllabus is quite rigid and strict; there isn’t much scope to explore material outside of it.

The material that gets selected for the syllabus is based on what somebody deems relevant. There’s so much more to the subjects we study that some would find a lot more interesting.

Tai Lopez — another successful dropout — also talks about this in his course 67 Steps. He believes the syllabus content could be more broad & more tailored to each student’s interests.

Every student is different, and there will be areas some find more interesting than others. Taking this approach would, in theory, create more engagement from students, rather than just propagating the “state-controlled manufacture of echos” as Norman Douglas said.

By reducing curiosity and deep exploration, you take the fun out of learning and reduce it to something kids do to “pass exams.”

This attitude to learning isn’t great for success in the real world. The people who are most successful in life have a deep and genuine curiosity for what they do. This allows them to explore and critically engage with their relative disciplines in a way that lets them consolidate existing skills/knowledge and explore new aspects of the game that bring success.

It also acts as one of the drivers that allows them to work hard & make the sacrifices necessary to become great.

Tick Box Mentality

This is similar to the “Pass Exam” mentality. Exams are structured in a way that leads students to fix their attention on hitting specific points on the mark scheme.

Their focus is on just ticking those boxes needed to get the grade.

Thing is, there’s more to a subject than what is on the mark scheme. There’s more to what we are learning about than what’s on the syllabus. But it all gets reduced to what we need to tick those boxes.

When you’re critically engaging with material from a curious and explorative point of view, you can gain so much more from learning. You look at the subject in a completely different way.

It stops being some boring, lifeless thing you’re doing so your parents don’t disown you. You start to look at how applicable the subject is. You look at its relevance in a wider range of domains — outside of the boxes you need to tick.

When this is happening, your brain is forming different types of neural connections as you comprehend the material much more deeply.

With the tick box mentality, because you’re reducing the subject, ignoring any aspects that aren’t going to “tick the box” for your examiner, you’re never going to understand the full relevance and breadth of the subject.

Taking this mentality into the real world can limit your progress for similar reasons as not having a curious, explorative perspective will.

Perfectionism

This is another aspect of the education system that Tai has condemned. The exam structure is geared toward perfectionism. It’s all about getting the “correct” answer and having flawless grades.

Of course, you can get wrong answers and still pass. You can also resit exams in the majority of situations. But even still, the system is geared toward perfectionism. The reward structure favours students who get things right and make the fewest mistakes.

Even when you can resit exams, there’s normally a limit. Again, this is something a lot of us carry on into the real world, in our work lives and in our relationships.

We’re overly scared of getting things wrong, it’s not deemed okay. We expect to have things figured out right away, and often pillory ourselves for failure.

This is the exact opposite of what most successful people do. It’s very rare for someone to do something great without multiple failures along the way. Most of the great inventions we see out in the world have a deep history of failure.

Thomas Edison failed 1000 times before he invented the light bulb. Humanity’s greatest space travel feats were only possible because scientists continued working past multiple failures. Some of the most influential leaders, artists and business owners have a history riddled with failure.

Great things rarely happen the first, second, or even 3rd time. Aiming for perfection isn’t bad per se, but having the wrong attitude to failure stops people far too early.

Mental Programming

The real problem here is that these ways of thinking become deeply embedded in our minds.

Unfortunately, we don’t get to leave these bad habits at school, that’s not how the brain works. When you engage in certain behaviours repeatedly, the brain forms neural connections that make it easier to continue doing that behaviour. It sets a precedent, programming the mind to continue working in that way, even in other aspects of your life.

This is why you see a lot of successful people are competitive, not just in business, but in all areas of their lives. People who are super-organized at work, tend to be super-organized at home. It’s why generally you can tell how someone keeps their home, by looking at the state of their car.

In the same way, spending 18+ years in education, engaging in systems that reinforce the tick box mentality, lack of tolerance for failure, and restrict genuine curiosity, translates through to post-education life.

You see it at work all the time. People do and say what they need to avoid getting fired. They tick whatever boxes they need for their paychecks. Most people don’t critically, curiously and authentically engage with their work.

If they do, it’s normally done to make more money and it’s done with the tick box mentality, reducing the work to only what is relevant for immediate financial success.

There’s often so much more to take from work than what our managers have said we need to do to not get fired and make more money: Understanding the broader use cases of products, businesses systems, market environment, how healthy businesses manage people, how unhealthy businesses manage people.

Looking at these things from a place of curiosity can allow you to gain more from your experiences, spotting the potential for wider applicability to your future work and personal life.

Curious, critical thinking is what helps you innovate at work and when running your own business.

This way of doing things brings life and enthusiasm to the otherwise boring and robotic tick-box approach. This is more productive in the long term, it’s a lot more enjoyable, and it’s better for your mental health.

I also see perfectionism limiting people at work and in their businesses all the time. It Creates paralysis by analysis, which stops some businesses from taking off and keeps people from taking the steps needed to progress in their careers.

I’m not saying that school is all bad. There are lots of great things I’ve learned and interesting topics I’ve studied with genuine curiosity (mainly at university). I also know lots of students who found their topics deeply engaging and went on to do further study.

I definitely don’t know enough to say if/ how the education system needs to be restructured. I know there are practical benefits to the way the current system works. I think a healthy fear of failure can be good and the tick box approach is beneficial in some circumstances.

But undoubtedly, there are a significant number of situations in life where the programming we received at school can be a major barrier limiting our scope to succeed, enjoy and explore in life. Just being more conscious of this can be very helpful.

Getting excited and curious about learning and working on effectively managing fear of failure, over time, can help rewire the brain, reducing some of the damage done from our years of schooling.

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