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To make personal progress you must first focus on what you want to achieve and build plans on how to carry this out. The competitive mindset is the antithesis of this. The difference between the personal mindset and the competitive mindset is where the locus of change sits. In the personal mindset the locus of change is with the individual.
Employers who require college degrees don’t do it because they necessarily think that those with college degrees are more likely to be valuable employees. Instead, this hiring practice is a relic of the pre-Internet era. It’s an HR-move that helps companies sort out applications that are more or less likely to be worth looking at. If you were hiring in 1990, when college graduates were much fewer and when there was really no other way to verify a candidate’s basic abilities like writing and showing up to work, a degree might have told you much more.
The idea that college is a good place to figure out what you want is deeply flawed because it is an environment and institution almost entirely isolated from the real world, without real consequences for failure or success, and without real incentives (i.e., prices, profit, loss) influencing
For many, education and schooling are at odds with each other, with schools designed to produce a different result than what the individual wants to get out of his education.
Education and work shouldn’t be easily divisible. Creating and enforcing an artificial barrier between the two just distances education from its application to our lives and makes us view work as a mere necessity.
Life is, in Camus’s words, absurd. We have to come to grips with this fact and create our own meaning from this lack of meaning.
The point to childhood is no different than the point to adulthood: there is no point. The point is to find meaning and fulfillment for ourselves. This is a deeply personal and subjective experience, and one that cannot be taught via scantron bubbles and school-wide textbooks.
Education ought to follow at least two points for providing young people with the freedom to craft meaningful lives for themselves: • Practical understanding of problem-solving • Freedom to craft individual meaning from the world
