As I was passing by a local snack store on the campus of a major university one day I overheard an apparently well educated man say the following…

“Believe me, I’m as educated as you can get…”

The immediate reaction in my mind was “Why, how humble of you.”

Then he continued.

“..but it doesn’t make me any smarter”.

I started to think about his statement and how it relates to my own thoughts. I know a lot of highly educated people. I’ve worked in a university environment, along with various high level technical businesses surrounded by educated people. Some of them were smart. Some of them needed help finding their own offices.

So I wondered just how “educated” this guy was. It didn’t take long for him to answer my question.

He continued to tell his companion that he had “2 masters and an undergraduate” all paid for by the military.

Here was a guy that apparently had a lot of education and understood the reality of that education. It didn’t make him any smarter, it just made him more educated.

There are many ways to educate yourself. You don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to do it. You can take online courses, read books, etc., but the most substantial way in my opinion it to pick a topic that interests you and try to build something with that topic. Whether it’s a business, a class, or some other way of passing on that knowledge, the whole process with educate you on that topic.

Build on this with any other topic you are interested in or do a deep dive on that one topic. The building process with educate you more than sitting in a classroom and taking periodic tests with no real world experience.

The Takeaway

Education doesn’t have to be expensive. Education doesn’t make you smart. You can’t get through the education he had been through without already being smart.