How would you like permission to skip school for the rest of your life as a student?
Or how about the ability to quit your job and do whatever you like for the rest of your career?
Well … I'm not sure I can help you with that.
But what I can do is give you some tips on how to live an interesting life. Here are six of them:
1. Be The Driver Of Your Education
There are two main forms of education:
* External Driven
* Self Driven
The first is the kind of education where you show up when you're told and sit where you're told. You even eat when you're told.
Sounds kind of like prison, doesn't it?
Prison? It Might Even Be Worse!
Not only do you have all kinds of pressures on your time. You've got people telling you what to learn.
Think about that:
What. To. Learn.
Oh no, no, no.
No and a thousand times no. That's not the path to an interesting life.
What you want instead is to …
Be The Boss And Manager Of Your Own Intelligence
Let me tell you a story:
I dropped out of high school in Grade 12.
There's a lot of detail surrounding this decision and some of it ain't pretty.
But sticking to the facts (and just the facts), I thought school was such a drag that I decided to stay home and read Collier's Encyclopedia.
Each morning I would leave home. But instead of getting the battered yellow school bus into town, I would hike up into the mountains. For months I experienced the Fall transform into Winter and then Spring from up above the highway where I would wait for my mom's car to pass by.
It sounds like something out of Hitchcock's Psycho, I know, but as I was watching the highway waiting for mom to go to work, I was listening and learning.
No, not listening to Heavy Metal. Not pop. Not even soft rock.
Instead, I was listening to the CBC on my fat yellow Walkman. At that time, Peter Gzowski, a.k.a. Mr. Canada, was the host of Morningside.
Over the course of the year, I got virtually a Ph.D. in Canadian culture, history, politics, literature and the arts. I also heard interviews with important people from around the world.
True, a bear might have mauled me while I was up there, and I did have a few close encounters with moose and deer. But the danger was worth it.
And after a few hours of Morningside, I would head down the mountain and make hot chocolate. With a steaming cup beside me on the coffee table, I would sit in the same rocking chair I was nursed in and read the Encyclopedia.
It was like being nursed all over again, this time by the knowledge my parents had invested in when they ordered the Encylopedia one volume at a time.
These days we have Wikipedia, but back then, if you wanted to know about the world, it cost a lot of money. I remember my mom talking about saving for the Encyclopedia year after year. She cut dozens of coupons from the newspaper so she could save more and complete the set.
It took about three years and after that, she kept up with the yearly updates for at least another three.
And this was all before I was old enough to read anything more complicated than Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. (Come to think of it, that story is rather complex …)
It was a lot of fun reading through Collier's Encyclopedia.
And educational.
When I finally did return to complete high school, I knew so much about the world that …
School Was EVEN MORE Boring!
But that was fine. Bec
Published on 9 years, 11 months ago
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