It was once written in an article about me that my formal education spanned just eight years. That was not correct. As I wrote last week, my formal schooling spanned just eight years, but my education continues to this day.
Through correspondence and part-time attendance at various institutions and universities, I took courses in traffic management, basic bookkeeping, English, public speaking, business valuations, numerous income tax courses, radio and television arts, and non-fiction writing. I also took two years of management accounting and spent four years obtaining my Chartered Accountant (now CPA) designation.
As important as the courses I took were, the books and articles I read were equally influential. As English essayist, Joseph Addison, wrote over three centuries ago, “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” And a couple of hundred years later Mark Twain added that “People who don’t read are no better off than people who can’t read.”
I’ve read tens of thousands of books and magazine articles since my schooling ended on June 30,1953. I subscribe to three print newspapers and read others online. And my career was such that never a day went by during which I didn’t learn something useful.
Acquiring knowledge is a matter of desire. I started working full-time when I was fourteen and it didn’t take long to realize that knowledge which I didn’t have someone else was getting paid for having; and in most cases getting paid a lot more than I was. So there were two drivers of my thirst for knowledge: an insatiable curiosity and a desire to make money.
I learned very early on that the next best thing to knowing the answer to a question is knowing where to find it. The realization that I didn’t have to remember all the details about a subject, but rather just where they could be found, allowed me to broaden my range of interests and knowledge. (Which is a lot easier in this internet age.) I was quite content to be a “jack of all trades and a master of none.” I also realized that the person who knows how to skillfully do something will always have a job, but the person who fully understands why it has to be done will be the boss.
I tried to learn something from every experience, always keeping an eye open for better ways to do things and to learn why particular results, good or bad, had occurred. When I was around people who knew more about something than I did I listened intently, observed carefully, and never hesitated to ask questions. As soon as I had a chance I made notes of what I’d learned. I classified my notes under about a hundred headings and reviewed them often; a practice I continue to this day. And these notes are the source of my Thought for the Day feature on Facebook.
It’s true that I didn’t have much schooling, but I think I’m actually well-educated