“A degree on a wall means you’re educated as much as shoes on your A feet mean you're walking. It's a start, but hardly sufficient. Otherwise, how could so many "educated" people make unreasonable decisions? Or miss so many obvious things? Partly it's because they forget that they ought to focus only on that which lies within their power to control. A surviving fragment from the philosopher Heraclitus expresses that reality:
"Many who have learned from Hesiod the countless names of gods and monsters never understand
that night and day are one."
Just as you can walk plenty well without shoes, you don't need to step into a classroom to understand the basic, fundamental reality of nature and of our proper role in it. Begin with awareness and reflection. Not just once, but every single second of every single day.” - Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic
"What is it then to be properly educated? It is learning to apply our natural preconceptions to the right things according to Nature, and beyond that to separate the things that lie within our power from those that don't." —EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 1.22.9-10
As the old saying goes, A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. This common phrase is a slight misquotation from Alexander Pope’s 1774 quote, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”
Anyone who has worked a corporate job and has witnessed a new college graduate’s first few months in the work-world can attest to the truth of this quote. At the company I used to work for we had a program called Management Services and this department existed solely to groom recent Ivy League college grads for supervisory and managerial positions.
These people would be strategically placed within a series of different departments for a few months at a time to learn how the business worked. Often, from the very first day, these fresh college grads had an air of superiority, felt they knew more than people with decades worth of experience, and were eager to prove their worth to their corporate bosses who lavished them with praise. These young people were convinced they would solve every problem and inefficiency in whatever department they were placed in a mere matter of months. Some of them did offer suggestions to make things better but more often, at the end of those few months these fresh-faced young people came away with little more than some hard lessons in how the real world works.
The truth is senior management worked to instill a false belief of superiority in them as a means of control—as a way to create a future loyal middle manager in the company who would always side with the decisions and values of senior management.
Not that any amount of education is necessarily a bad thing, rather it’s the false confidence that many of those people with a little education and not much life-experience tend to have. This false confidence misleads them into believing they’re more learned, expert, and wise than they really are.
For education to truly be beneficial it must be coupled with real world life-experience. This takes time and the willingness to commit to a lifetime of continuous learning. The Japanese have a wonderful philosophy of continuous improvement in regard to business called Kaizen. But Kaizen can be applied to our personal lives as well.
The truth is none of us will ever be perfect, but we can strive to become better. For that continuous improvement to occur we must first reject the pompous notion that we've already learned everything there is to know. If we want to experience true success in life it’s necessary to commit to lifelong learning. We'll never be omniscient in our current form and this brings a strange sort of comfort to me.
Each morning of this next week I urge you to ask yourself:
How Can I Deepen My Knowledge Today?
Be well, make the most of this day. Thank you for reading!
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