School Fails to Teach You Some of the Important Stuff. Here Are Some Life Lessons You Don’t Learn in School.
School is good for a lot of things but preparing us for the realities of life might not be one of them. As the world gets ever more complicated to negotiate, there are some lessons we wish our teachers would’ve taught because when you learn them along your adult journey, they are often more challenging to adapt to.
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Here are 15 Things Your Teachers Didn’t Teach You.
Reading this long boring article is a lot of work. Skip it and switch over to the quick little video version of this article:
With that said, let’s jump straight into the article.
1
Self-Discipline and Self-Motivation
After high school, no one is going to check up on you. The schooling sausage factory works on masse because it’s set up with constant checks and balances. Punishment based on non-delivery means you never need to build up a sense of self-discipline or self-motivation.
The reason you keep delivering at school is that someone is cracking the whip. The rest of life isn’t like this. There isn’t a make-up test or a gentle reminder, there is usually just failure and even losing a deal or a job. To succeed you will need to find your personal self-discipline and self-motivation, more on this on point 15.
2
How to Sell
Whatever you do in life you need to know how to sell. Sell yourself, sell a product, sell a concept or an idea. School doesn’t offer many opportunities to stretch this muscle. Selling requires epic in the moment thinking, and the ability to stay motivated even if you get a hard “No”.
The most important truth about sales is that nothing but a closed sale, counts. Unlike school where your teacher might give half points for somewhat correct answers, you get no points whatsoever for “Maybe” or “I’ll think about it” in sales.
3
You Are in Control of Your Mind/Thoughts
There is so much “group think” or herd mentality in school that there is almost no time to develop your own system of controlling your thoughts, impulses, and mind.
Scott D. Johnson of the University of Richmond, wrote an interesting paper explaining this phenomenon: “Groupthink is an unhealthy decision-making pattern characterized by a high degree of cohesiveness and a striving for consensus among the members of a decision-making group.”
This might sound like a recipe for peace on Earth. But it has a negative affect too. Being motivated by a fear of fitting in, or people pleasing, doesn’t allow for critical-thinking skills, decision-making skills, small group communication skills, and conflict management skills, all of which are valuable in life.
4
How to Find Funding
From the minute you are thrust into the world you need money. We’re not talking about just a salary and living happily ever after. Finding funding to study or getting credit from the bank for a house or to start a business, is a complicated skill. One that teachers entirely fail to teach.
Knowing how credit works, understanding credit scores and how to put together a business funding proposal, are all so important.
5
How to Pitch Your Ideas Effectively
Speaking of getting business funding, something of critical importance is formulating your ideas in such a way that people understand and want to back them. This is important in all aspects of life. Whether you’re working in a team on a work project, or even just putting across your views at a neighbourhood meeting, it’s critical to be able to get your message across comprehensively and with motivation. You need these skills to succeed in life.
This all boils down to one nugget, stick around to find out the critical thing your teachers failed to teach you.
6
How to Apply and Interview for a Job
It’s all good and well to have a great list of achievements when you leave school, but if you don’t have the skills and experience of going about job seeking, then you won’t get very far with those grades.
Job seeking requires knowledge on putting a CV together, writing a relevant cover letter, conducting a great interview and how and when to follow up. Oops, that’s a FAIL for most schools in this department. But don’t worry, at Alux we have you covered in our video:
7
How to Calculate Risks
In school all risks are bad, the polarised wrong and right isn’t effective in the real world. This is an extension of the “group think” of schooling. And we get that it is important to keep order when you have hundreds of children in one building, but if you can’t colour outside the lines, you will never find out that mistakes make a masterpiece.
In life there aren’t always clear wrong and right answers. We must choose the lesser risk all the time. Getting comfortable with how to calculate this is overlooked in school so adulthood can seem like an onslaught of difficult situations that can be overwhelming.
8
Money Needs to Be Managed
Much of the rhetoric at school is around earning a big salary and then you will be wealthy. Do well and secure yourself a good job like a programmer or a lawyer and you will have the money you need. What teachers fail to teach is that no matter how much money you have, or don’t have, it’s how you manage it that determines if you have enough.
Basic household budgeting, a proper understanding of assets and liabilities and managing your wealth should go hand in hand with motivating kids for top earning.
9
Don’t Fear Taxes
When it comes to things that scare us, it’s easy to ignore them, hoping they will go away. Taxes are certainly one of these things. Taxes are often explained by older generations as so complicated and as if they are out to “get you” that most of us are too petrified to look under the hood.
But taxes are inevitable. They won’t just disappear. And taxes can be an advantage in your wealth. Learn to leverage taxes to work for you like the rich do.
For starters take a look at this video:
10
Invest Money, Don’t Spend It on “Assets”
Most kiddo conversations about money go like this: “When I get money, I am going to buy a house and a car and be rich.”
And a teachers financial teaching usually ends around a comment on “remember that you have to pay your bond and your car loan before you can buy sunglasses or go on holiday.”
But none of those are solid financial principals. Firstly, a home with a bond and a car are not true assets, they are liabilities. If you are going to amass a household bond and car loan you might find yourself stuck with only those two pieces of property for the rest of your life. You might upgrade your house or car, but you won’t reduce your debt and increase your wealth portfolio.
A great investment option is investing your money in crypto, check out 15 Reasons Why You Should Invest In Crypto.
11
You don’t have to get a job, you can start a business
There is a strong push towards choosing a “career” something that you can study and at the end pop out a doctor or a pilot. In most countries there isn’t much focus on fostering an entrepreneurial spirit during school. One that captures the imagination of the child to create their own business, product, or service.
12
Negotiation skills
Stemming from the culture of compliance that schooling requires, there is little or no room to hone your negotiation skills. Deadlines are deadlines, assignment deliverables are rigid, and in exams there is no leeway between right and wrong. That is all understandable, it wouldn’t be practical to mark 600 exams all with different right answers.
However, this system lacks space for negotiation. And debate team is not negotiating. Negotiating is taking two different stand points and finding a middle ground for both parties. This is a star-making quality, one that schooling fails to foster.
13
Self-Awareness Is as Important as General Knowledge
Knowing who you are and what your beliefs and weaknesses are, is important to succeed in all aspects of your life. Being able to assess if your mindset is holding you back, or how a decision affects or benefits you and your situation is important.
Schooling and our teachers don’t teach us to get to know ourselves and how that knowledge can make us stronger.
14
Failure Is Inevitable
In school, failure is the end of the world. It often means you can’t progress. We begin to see failure as a purely negative experience.
But failure is often the fastest route to the right answer… if we are not afraid to learn from it. Author of “Leaders Eat Last” Simon Sinek put it best when he said: “Our struggles are the short-term lessons we learn to achieve long term success.”
15
Daily Habits maketh the person
Pulling off one epic assignment or cramming to ace an exam is impressive, but it’s not sustainable and too stressful as an approach to life. The same goes for relationships. Being a total jerk all year and then giving your teacher a $200 Spa voucher, is the equivalent of being a Valentine’s Day partner.
As routine as schooling thinks it is, it isn’t. The average adult works 50 straight weeks a year with a 2-week annual holiday, and every month you have a big assignment, it’s called: paying the damn bills!
If you don’t have some easy daily habits that keep the basics in order, your life will be an uphill struggle of feast and famine, or total highs and crushing lows.
But you know what Aluxers, not all is lost. The beautiful thing about realizing you still have a lot left to learn, is that YOU are in control. You can choose to level up your life… and we just launched the course that will help you make it happen.
It’s called learning mastery. If you’re an entrepreneur looking for growth… a manager shooting for a promotion… a student looking to learn faster or a creator looking to expand their abilities,
Learning how to learn is the one skill to rule them all, and we can’t wait for you to experience it first hand. Enroll today by going to alux.com/learn! See you on the inside, Aluxer.
Question:
Alright, before we wrap this up, we’re curious – what’s something you think should be taught in schools, but isn’t? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
