On Education.

The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past.Edition 270.

All images via prompts to MidJourney

The Power of Education.

Three of the most powerful forces in the world are a) gravity b) compound interest and c) the bond between a mother and a child.

They have always existed driven by the power of science, math and nature.

An even more powerful force than these is education.

Education lifts us up while gravity holds us down.

Education compounds even more than compound interest in that it increases not just returns to money but returns to living.

Education is seen as crucial by mothers and fathers who invest and sacrifice for it.

Education has never been more important.

Today in a world of change it is critical to upgrade our mental and emotional operating systems.

Transformation of lives and companies happen when talent transforms and the only way to do so is through education.

Education can be academic and in institutions and classrooms but a lot of education comes from the school of life, risk taking and experience.

While credentials may be important, education is less about degrees and more about learning new skills. It is about the building of new insights by connecting dots in new ways. The growth that comes from reflecting and building on failure and mistakes. The layers of experience that transform a body of knowledge into craft and expertise.

Education has never been easier.

While certain schools in countries continue to be highly expensive and deeply selective (often for no other reason than to constrain supply to allow graduates to earn high incomes) they are forgetting that education is about abundance versus scarcity. This mindset and way of teaching has now begun a rapid decline.

Today, a new world order and range of learning is increasingly available and will soon completely disrupt the old ways. Low cost resources from online courses, YouTube, AI tools and a series of credential courses from guilds and companies are making learning, training and skill development easier and easier. These skill sets can be monetized in a range of ways that does not require having credentials to get a job. World class tools including compute are available in the cloud on a just in time basis, AI agents to staff teams, and global marketplaces to access talent and inputs and sell services and products are a click away on the mobile device 24 hours a day.

The key is not to think of education as a signal to get us into a place but a way of building life long skills and learning that enables us to find meaningful, purposeful and rewarding work.

Education has never been more challenged.

Most professional education establishments are imparting irrelevant skills, concentrated in the first 25 years of life, using out of date approaches, for a job market that no longer exists.

Education in the traditional way is being deeply disrupted and the people in charge of learning are now going to have to go about unlearning their pedagogy!

The new educators will be a combination of reinvented outfits and self-educators, who enable and access new skills, across fifty year working careers, leveraging the latest methods and technologies , with a recognition that the majority of us will find meaningful purposeful work outside of jobs in a company.

The disparity between what is needed and where the future is going is a wide chasm.

How to self-educate.

Education is also not just about constant life-long learning but also unlearning.

The future does not fit in the mindsets of the past.

Five keys to self-educate when one has highly limited budgets and little to no time:

1. Set an hour a day to learn. This builds cognition which is the ability to think.

2. Build a case once in a while for the opposite of what you believe is true. This enables curiosity which is about asking what if? And why not?

3. Pay attention to what gives you flow and fit. This allows one to be creative which is best described as an expression of oneself.

4. Start with AI tools not search. Converse with other humans and machines. This will build skills of the choreographer allowing us to connect alien (eg. agentic AI ) and human life forms to drive outcomes.

5. Practice story telling in a multitude of forms from oral to visual to verbal. This will help us be communicators who can convince and move people.

Architecting, building, honing skills of cognition, creativity, curiosity, choreography and communication is the key to our future.

And educating ourselves in these is the best way to find purpose, meaning and rewards.

Rishad Tobaccowala is a Company of One.