The Importance of Self Education Revisited - with Dan Sullivan and Joe Polish - I Love Marketing Episode #339

The educational system as we understand it. The real problem is system. People say, well, we need a better educational system. And I said, well, there's nothing wrong with the thought of education, but there is a lot of problem with the word system. I'm Dean Jackson, he's Joe Polish, and this is the I Love Marketing podcast.

Five years ago, Dan Sullivan shared with Joe the self education plan for entrepreneurs. It was a brand new way of thinking about your thinking that leads to more curiosity and more success. Today we revisit that conversation in an edit that offers the key points in less than 12 minutes. If you want more from Dan Sullivan and Joe Polish, be sure to check out their podcast 10X Talk. Wherever you listen to podcasts or check them out online@10xtalk.com Remember to subscribe to I Love Marketing. So that you don't miss a Future episode, visit ilovemarketing.com subscribe for more talk.

About your perspective of the educational system and what it does well and what it does not do well. Well, you know, I mean, I'll just start this off that, you know, I've had a lot of time to think about this because I actually started first in 1950, so that's over six decades. And I've given a lot of thought, you know, about what is the ideal educational system for me personally. And I came up with one answer that I think would be good, and that is I would really appreciate an educational system that really taught me how to think about my thinking. In other words, what the educational system teaches you is to think about things out in the world, people out in the world, and certain kinds of thoughts. But it doesn't actually teach people the flexibility of actually being able to sort of observe how they actually go about problem solving and asking questions and learning. And I've taught myself how to do that. And that's the basis of Strategic Coach. And one of the reasons why I focused on entrepreneurs is because entrepreneurs have to learn or they get punished very quickly in the form of various kinds of failure. And so entrepreneurs, I think just by the life that they live in the marketplace, since they don't have any safety net, they don't have anyone protecting them, they have to be extremely fast learning. And the people who work for an entrepreneur have to be very, very fast learning individuals as compared to individuals who, say, work in large corporations where not too much is demanded of them, as compared to what we expect of our team and Strategic Coach. But let me just say that the educational system as we understand it, the real problem is system and People say, well, we need a better educational system. And I said, well, there's nothing wrong with the thought of education, but there is a lot of problem with the word system, because the educational system actually grew up to train people to work for a lifetime and fairly repetitive and fairly boring work over a 40 year period in large systems, whether it was a factory system or, you know, a large office system. It could be a corporate office system, it could be, you know, a government office system. But essentially before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, where you got into mass manufacturing, where you had really, really huge organizational forums, there was no educational system, or it was provided by religious groups or was provided individually. A lot of people were essentially before the 1850s in North America, they were essentially taught by their parents or they were taught in their church where the family belonged to a particular church group. Generally, they learned their English by reading the Bible or reading stories. They learned how to do English, and they learned the amount of math that was necessary for practical life. And everything had a practical purpose. But then once the employment of large numbers of people started to be in these large systems, which, you know, really required the ability to be okay with doing things repetitively and doing things that were kind of boring, they had to reproduce in children's childhood, starting at 5 or 6 years old and going up to 18, that they were going to accustom them to repetition and they were going to accustom them to boredom so that it was okay when they got out. They would be productively repetitive and they would be productively bored. So what it did is that it taught them actually to not give way to their imagination, but to actually suppress their imagination. But then it set out a set of standards of what represented you being a really, really great student so that you could be promoted to the next level. And then eventually university became around the 1950s and 60s, you know, you had grade school, and then most people just went to grade school, and then you had high school. And then in the 1950s and 60s, college and university started being required. And there was a notion of how good you had to be at memorizing and rote learning so that you could pass the test that would get you onto the next level. And Joe, this is where it really relates back to the whole notion of why it's very, very difficult to go through 20 years of that and then come out into the marketplace. And that is that from the moment you're five or six years old until, let's say you've gone through graduate school and you're 24, 25 years old, you're expected to make this entire educational journey entirely on yourself. You're a lone, isolated individual and you have to do everything 100%, you have to study 100%, you have to pass the tests 100%. And as a matter of fact, any kind of teamwork in the educational system is called cheating. You know, like if there was five or six individuals who got together and said, hey, what are you good at? And what am I good at? And they actually took tests and they traded notes so that everybody got a high grade, that would be called cheating. And yet, when people get out into the business marketplace, the whole business marketplace is based on creative and productive cheating. So, I mean, if you got to 25 and you haven't learned how to cheat, and then you go for the rest of your life in a system where cheating is rewarded, you know, you're either going to go through a very painful period of learning, or you're going to resort to drugs, or you're going to resort to government welfare to get through the rest of your life. So that's my whole point. I think the whole nature of how you put the individual light on the individual who's expected to be good at everything and pass all the tests 100% and turn in great homework and their assignments are perfect and they're graded on their assignments. That's not the way the world works. Especially since the microchip has become the organizing principle. And all we're looking for is people who are just really good at something and they can combine their abilities with the unique abilities, which are very different, unique abilities with other people. And so part of the crises that we're experiencing, economic, cultural, political crises we're experiencing, is that we've basically educated five or six generations of people to be perfectionists. But the marketplace, the way it's developing worldwide, is really requiring massive amounts of teamwork where you just focus on what you're good at. What I'm suggesting you here, Joe, is that the educational model, first of all, it's not a system. Like you have a big broad system, like a national system, I think that's gone. There's no system to it. And what you're going to see more and more is that there's the capacity, especially using microchip based tools and networks and systems and programs for people to individually design their own education. But the biggest institution, if you will, which I think actually creates right attitudes and right skills and right habits for people, is working in an entrepreneurial company that's constantly Forced to change to create new value in the marketplace. One thing is that the responsibility for good education is very quickly evaporating from government. You know, government really took major control. The public educational system is a government run education system. And I think the government no longer has the ability to educate children for the marketplace. That's a decisive historical change. And the responsibility is actually falling back more and more on parents. I think the homeschooling movement in the United States is spreading very rapidly and the Americans are far ahead of the rest of the world in this because Americans generally almost. I think it's part of the American DNA to have sort of a negative and suspicious attitude towards what government is doing to your children. So I think that Americans have more and more taken back this activity and responsibility from the government. But I think it's going to be a mess. And I don't think that there's any answer. I don't think that there's any general answer to the educational thing, but I think that there's some principles which you would have to start on those principles. My biggest principle is that everybody has a unique ability, and that is that there's something unique. They have a particular ability to see something that other people can't see. They have a particular ability to figure out things in a way that other people can figure out things. And they have an ability to achieve things in a way that other people can achieve. And the sooner in life that a person can kind of actually get a handle on that, that becomes sort of the organizing principle. And then if you take that, what I call unique ability and use that as the basis for lifetime education. So you're building this when you're 6 years old, but you can go ahead to 86 years old and the person is still building the thing that's been going for 80 years. And the way they're doing that is that they're continually learning how to sell themselves on a bigger and better situation around them. So you have unique ability and then you have the ability to sell. Then the other thing is linking up your unique ability with other people's unique abilities. So you create a multiplier effect. And Joe, this is what I'm seeing, so I'm just going to put those three out, that these are the fundamental basis for education in the 21st century. One is unique ability, the second one is the ability to sell, and the third one is the ability to create unique ability, teamwork. And if you just look at your own progress over 25 years or more, you'll see that your big jumps in progress personally and organizationally has really come about because you got clearer and clearer and more committed to those three things. The educational system is out of whack with what people are going to do for the rest of their life. Having said that, I think that there are great teachers who actually do teach those skills of unique ability who are inside the system. I mean, I can think of a couple teachers that I had in the formal system who I thought were very inspirational and they supported me in the right ways. But they're not great teachers because they're in the system. They're great teachers because they're probably really great at custom designing and teaching themselves.

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