Hacking your Education

I've had my nose stuck in Hacking your Education by Dale J Stephens since I wrote my last post.  It's aimed at young people contemplating university, and I've already been, so I've been reading out of curiosity rather than to learn tips to apply to my life. Was it still a worthwhile read? Yes...

In a nutshell, the book is pretty much a "how to" guide for any young person who wants to map out their own path outside the traditional (and expensive) university route and get a great job or start their own business at the end of it. It's full of case studies of friends and acquaintances who, for whatever reason, didn't attend university at all or dropped out and made successes of themselves through grit, determination, good luck and a fair amount of blagging and hustling.

Stephens thinks there are 3 main reasons why we go to university: the social experience, to get a job, and to learn for learning's sake.  He argues we can get these things in the real world, without having to pay out for university and have more fun in the process.

So far, so good. But how? Stephens has tonnes of suggestions.  Figure out what you're really interested in.  Commit to learning outside the classroom. Make a to-learn list, find someone or a group of people to keep you accountable, and put yourself out there (he suggests setting up a personal website that becomes your online portfolio of experiences).  Learn in groups with other like minded people. Figure out your talents and how you learn best. Find mentors and teachers. Network, have lots of coffees. Use technology, become a writer or a programmer! Gate crash conferences and university lectures! Take advantage of free educational resources. Have your 2 minute pitch ready! Start up a company. Travel the world! Don't pursue traditional jobs through traditional routes (never send in your CV!). Get a job through your network. They'll call you! (Well, sort of - that happened to some of the people in the case studies). Phew. As he says at the start, this is not a book about dropping out and taking the easy option.

In the book he also talks about Peter Thiel, the tech entrepreneur and co-founder of PayPal, who set up the Thiel Fellowship in 2010 to give grants to people under 20 to spur them to quit college and pursue their own ventures (Stephens is part of this programme). This quote from Thiel made me think back to my post on expectations:

"The problem that exists with schooling is that it ends up convincing most people that they're mediocre, and then the talented people get regrouped and are forced to compete with each other, and then most of them get convinced they're mediocre as well, and you sort of cycle and repeat, until people's dreams and aspirations are badly beaten out of them over time." 

What did I learn from all of this? Well, I had no idea that universities like MIT in the US had made their course materials available for free online (yes, really! See here). Not only that, you can listen to university lectures on iTunes U, including from Harvard, which I think is pretty amazing.  I'm tempted to take a few modules...  Also the case studies in Hacking your Education are full of examples of young people basically designing their own jobs, just as Roman Krznaric suggests in How to Find Fulfilling Work.  It's reinforcing the message to put aside other people's expectations and do your own thing.

On reflection, it made me realise that there are loads of examples of people who have "hacked their education".  Dynamo the magician (who I wrote about here) could quite easily have been a case study in this book. Someone else I'm a fan of, the writer Caitlin Moran, could have been too - she educated herself in her local library and subsequently blagged her way to becoming a writer. Also, these twin sisters taught themselves to embroider by watching youtube videos and are now sought after artists.  I find these stories so inspiring. You can learn anything you want! It's all out there waiting for you.

Is rejecting formal education the new fashion?

I wrote a post on Thoreau's thoughts on learning recently (you can see it here) and I have been thinking about it a lot since.  He questions the role of formal education and makes the case for learning by doing, and teaching yourself.

I am a pretty straight laced sort of person and I like to stick to the rules (even if they are silly), which sometimes winds my (much more free spirited) husband up.  I followed the conventional education route and have worked in steady jobs ever since leaving university.  

Since reading Walden, Thoreau's ideas about learning have been on my mind and, as a consequence, I have noticed some interesting articles that wouldn't have been on my radar otherwise.

One of these was on a blog, zenhabits, which I stumbled across a couple of weeks ago. It is one of the most popular blogs on the internet.  The writer, Leo Babauta, has 6 children and is a proponent of unschooling. He has an entire blog devoted to it, Unschoolery.  He makes the case for self directed learning, but also offers some insights for teachers to help them unschool their regular classroom.

I also followed a link from John Armstrong's website to wired.co.uk which, coincidentally, had a Q&A with Dale Stephens, founder of the Uncollege movement.  Stephens has written a book, called Hacking your Education, which I have also added to my reading list.  The article says Uncollege

"encourages students to be self-directed learners and to create a 'learning community in the real world' that breaks the 'dichotomy between education and life.'"

This has some real parallels with the youtube video I mentioned in my post On Expectations recently, that is, school and life shouldn't feel like two separate worlds.

Is the point of education having the certificate at the end of it or the knowledge? Or is the knowledge enough?

How to Worry Less About Money

"How to Worry Less About Money" by John Armstrong is another book in the School of Life series.  It is a really great (and short) book which gave me a completely different perspective on money, my thoughts about it and what I spend it on.  The author offers a very refreshing and honest insight into his own money worries and how he has learnt to process them constructively.  In his own words, the book is about

"how we can bring imagination, self-knowledge, emotional maturity, and our big ideas about life and society, into the way we engage with money."

Armstrong kicks off by explaining that money worries aren't the same as money troubles (i.e. not being able to pay your bills).  He says worries are connected to imagination and the emotions, not just to what is happening here and now. Instead of simply asking how can I get more money or manage with less money, we should be asking how much money do we need and what do we need it for.

He argues that money worries are just other worries disguised as money worries, and urges us to think more deeply about the underlying cause of our worries. He illustrates this by talking about his car, which makes him feel anxious about money. He's worried that it's starting to get a bit rough round the edges, needs various repairs, isn't as fancy as other people's cars at the tennis club, and he can't afford to replace it. He digs into this a bit deeper and concedes that what he's really worried about not taking care of things properly. He's worried about his character, and buying a new car isn't going to change this, it will not make him better at looking after it.

Although I don't worry about financial security I do think about money a lot, mostly because I worry about the prices of things and I generally feel guilty if I spend a lot of money on something. I should probably spend some time thinking about what it is that I'm really worried about...

Armstrong makes some great comments about worrying (which I know I do quite a lot):

"Worry is a name for mental effort: ideally one wants to worry more insightfully and more purposefully. The aim of adult life, one might say, is to worry well. We worry about things that matter; worry implies care."

He talks about money as a medium of exchange and reminds us that almost anything can be turned into money, and money can be turned into anything.  We need to think about how we make money, and what possessions and activities we turn our money into. It's a mistake to think that the means are the ends, and that the medium of exchange is a "real thing". He argues we should think about money's relationship with flourishing (rather than happiness).

"Money brings about good consequences - helps us live valuable lives - only when joined with 'virtues'. Virtues are good abilities of mind and character."

I found his thoughts on Need versus Want really interesting.  He argues that needs are not necessarily just basic food, shelter, or the cheapest thing.  What we view as a "need" depends on what's important to us.  This is what he says:

"Need is deeper - bound up with the serious narrative of one's life. 'Do I need this?' is a way of asking: how important is this thing, how central is it to my becoming a good version of myself; what is it actually for in my life? This interrogation is designed to distinguish needs from mere wants."

He gives as an example a fine violinist who needs a very expensive bow, because this bow has a central role to play in this person's life.

He also looks at price versus value, and he says something here that made me think of the pursuit of material things that I talked about in the Status Anxiety post recently.  He talks about something inexpensive that he bought and collected over time, that he said he gets "a reliable, everyday thrill from using."

The pleasure we get from our possessions can be very real - I asked my husband to list his favourite things and he said our collection of photos and art, his guitar, and his surfboards.

When I was early in my career living in London I lusted after, and then after some encouragement from my flatmate Suzanne, eventually bought, a gold trench coat. It was GBP250 and the most expensive item of clothing I had ever bought. I loved wearing it so much, I used to joke to Suzanne that wearing it made me feel like a better person.  I have photos from a girls' weekend in Paris of me wearing that coat and it makes me so happy to see it (and remember the weekend of course).  The flip side of clothes shopping (which I do much less nowadays, and enjoy it far less than I did when I was younger), is impulse buying, bargain shopping (especially on the internet), basically buying for the sake of it. Most of the time this gives me a very short lived shopper's high, then a week later I forget I've even bought it. I hate this type of shopping and I want to try to cut it out.  

After reading this book, I want to spend money in a more mindful way, buy things that we'll treasure, that will last, that will give us a reliable, everyday thrill or allow us to flourish.  As Armstrong says, we have to look into ourselves and think what money means to us, not simply try to maximise the amount we have.

Status Anxiety and its solutions

I've finished reading Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton. In his "solutions" section he puts forward some interesting ideas we can draw on to counter status anxiety and feeling bad about our position in society or how we think other people view us.

He groups them into big themes: Philosophy, Art, Politics, Religion and Bohemia.

In Philosophy, he talks about some of the philosophers in history who argued that the rest of society is stupid / ill informed / wrong and therefore we should dismiss and ignore other people's opinions of us.  He goes on to state that the obvious result of this sort of attitude is that one will likely end up with no friends. Hmm, doesn't sound very appealing.

Next he talks about Art - specifically novels, painting, tragedy and comedy.  He points out that novels have the ability to show us the moral good in people who would, if only based on their lack of outward symbols of status like wealth or power, be regarded by others as unimportant.  He says in life we only give praise to moral goodness that is outwardly displayed, but in novels we can listen in to the characters' thoughts and eavesdrop on conversations, which can give us a different perspective on them and make us appreciate their deeper qualities. In making his arguments he makes references the implicit social commentary in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and George Eliot's Middlemarch. I liked this idea and it reminded me that novels can teach us a lot about life, it doesn't always have to be through non-fiction. I haven't read either of these books so I'm adding them to my list.

The rest of the Art section didn't really strike a chord with me, but the Politics section made up for it. He starts by talking about what "status" meant in different societies through history and found that it was sometimes contradictory, and ever changing. In 2004 when the book was written he said that high status meant:

"[someone who has] been able to accumulate money, power and renown through his or her own accomplishments (rather than through inheritance) in one of the myriad sectors of the commercial world (including sport, art and scientific research)."

He talks later about our pursuit of material things, and how advertisers sell us things like cars:

"...[the advert will] fail to mention our tendency to cease to be excited by anything after we have owned it for a short while...We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction...Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another...The new car will be rapidly absorbed, like all the other wonders we already own, into the material backdrop of our lives, where we will hardly register its existence..."

This section made me think a lot, particularly the lines quoted above. I mentioned it to my husband and we had a good chat about our different buying styles, and which of our possessions give us pleasure beyond the initial rush of buying them.  I think this will probably deserve a separate blog post on its own...

The other part that I liked in the politics section was his recounting of a scene from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.  Woolf is denied entry into Trinity College Library at Cambridge University because she is a woman (she was told she could only enter if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or if she had a letter of introduction).  Instead of thinking "what's wrong with me?" she thought "what's wrong with them?".  After this she came up with a set of political demands for women, which included "a room of one's own".  I've never read this book, but that was my university library so it caught my imagination - I know that as a naive 18 year old I took it completely for granted that I could come and go as I pleased.

The remaining sections of the book cover Religion (where he reminds us that in the end we're all going to die so status anxiety is a bit pointless) and Bohemia, where he pointed out that there are groups of people who choose to forgo status giving activities and possessions, and he talked about Henry David Thoreau and his time at Walden Pond as an example.  

So...to wrap up, I liked this book and definitely had a different perspective reading it now than when it was first published.  Even so, the quote about status in Roman Krznaric's book is still my favourite on the topic and had the most impact on me and how I think about status. So punchy, so simple and so true.