Life Skills: Failed

Life: Still waiting for your plan!
Me: But this is too hard to comprehend. I don’t have the slightest clue what to do next. I'm stuck!
Life: What? But you’re educated! Do you know what that means? It means you were once a student in a school and schools provide you with everything you need to know in life.

At that moment, I experienced BRAIN FOG.
Bewilderment prevailed…… Confusion filled the place.

School did teach me Everything…. & Nothing at all.

I can't help but appreciate the privileges of education. Education is indeed a valuable asset to our society. As a matter of fact, high school and college are excellent in teaching many valuable information about different topics, but not LIFE lessons that are necessary for thriving in life.

Instead, here is what I would love to see changed and integrated into the education system:

Classes for important life skills that a student will carry with them after graduating from high school, in order to successfully navigate careers and relationships to become a well-rounded person. Some of which are: personal growth, interpersonal communication, money management, emotional intelligence, dealing with rejection, accepting failure, and the importance of mental health. I am not saying to eliminate all existing classes from the education system, but to reshape them. For instance, talk about investment frauds, how to pick the right health insurance, types of horrible investments, and financial responsibilities in the mathematics class.

When it comes to general knowledge, schools taught us to memorize information and stress out if we forget a word, or else we FAIIIIIIL the exam. Working on the MEMORY aspect, nice! But where is the CREATIVITY part? Retaining memorized information written in books and getting an “A” just because you wrote the whole MEMORIZED paragraph correct without missing any word is not an achievement that your later self will thank you on. Where is LOGIC? CRITICAL THINKING? Problem-solving skills? These cognitive skills are the ones we will be applying to real-world scenarios with the highest stakes.

Unfortunately, you as a student didn’t understand a word from the paragraph you memorized. Did you?

Also, I can’t give college a hall pass on this one either.

I grew up to understand that college wasn’t the safest, sure way for a great career. College claims to be preparing us for the workforce, but it is actually distorting our perception of reality with grades. You can pass a test successfully and get an A on your exam, but no matter what you do you can’t pass your exam in life from the FIRST TIME with an A.

“To learn to succeed, you must first learn to fail”. -Michael Jordan-

And yes, the data is coming to back up that statement. Read on.

The genius Albert Einstein, who is now a Nobel-winner physicist, had many failures before he tasted success.

1905 Mistake in the first proof of E = mc2
1906 Mistakes in the second, third, and fourth proofs of E = mc2
1907 Mistake in the synchronization procedure for accelerated clocks
1911 Mistake in the first calculation of the bending of light
1913 Mistake in the first attempt at a theory of general relativity
1914 Mistake in the fifth proof of E = mc2
1915 Mistake in the Einstein-de Haas experiment
1916 Mistake in the interpretation of Mach’s principle
1917 Mistake in the introduction of the cosmological constant (the “biggest blunder”)
1919 Mistakes in two attempts to modify general relativity
1925 Mistakes and more mistakes in the attempts to formulate a unified theory

…………and the list goes on.

When it comes to success, school trained us to fail in the real world. It trained us to have the mindset that exerting effort will always bring us a measurable and successful result. Too bad, the real world doesn’t work like that. Let’s take this example: when a student gets turned down for a job for the first time, they will directly think that something is wrong with them and that they are not enough. They will doubt and underestimate themselves. How did I get many As at school but can’t land a job? They weren’t mentally prepared for this step, because schools taught them that if you had excellent grades, then you should definitely get this job.

…. But when students hit reality, everything becomes shocking for them after cultivating results for 12 consecutive years. This makes us understand that neither school and college did work on our personal growth nor taught us how to feel good about ourselves despite the harsh reality. We were taught to connect our inner feelings to the outer circumstances and feel accordingly.

So put a finger down if you agree that our education system is of dire need for reform. This way, we can sustainably overcome any kind of crisis in this world. After all, it all starts with an EDUCATED society. Don’t forget that there are plenty of opportunities out there, if the first doesn’t work out, jump to the second. What matters is that you DON’T GIVE UP.