one thing nobody can take away
What is the one thing that nobody can ever take away from you?
Pause for a second...and answer this one honestly.
What is that one thing for you?
My answer: your education.
This was something I heard from a teacher around 5th or 6th grade who was trying to impress upon us the importance and infinite value of a good education.
I agreed with him and still do.
Some other, more important elements certainly come to mind, such as honesty, self-respect, honor, and dignity. However, each of these is certainly not mutually exclusive with a good education and is, on the contrary, strengthened.
While my science teacher who originally gave me this idea was referring to education in the academic sense, I don't solely mean it in this way. Some education acquired outside of a traditional academic setting can even be more valuable. A good frame of reference is Mark Twain's assertion: "I never let my schooling interfere with my education."
Real world experiences, travel, and personal triumph are all forms of education. A new perspective that builds empathy and compassion, for example, is educational and can last forever. Equally important are the realizations of your capabilities. The times you've pushed yourself mentally or physically past what you once thought was possible are invaluable lessons acquired through pain and persistence.
You may be proven wrong about certain things you've learned, but your education is never taken away in such instances. Everyone learns and changes over time, and the recognition of how you learn new things is educational in itself.
I've talked before about how learning is the most important skill to acquire and continually refine, but you still need to decide on which topics you'll become educated on after high school, after college, after graduate school, and well...forever. It never stops, and while your education should ideally be both diversified and specialized, there's one subject in particular that's worth incorporating:
One or more foreign language(s).
Having to learn the alphabet and basic vocabulary in a new language as an adult may seem like a waste a time, especially if it isn't required for your profession or personal life, but it is a window to other immense parts of the world. Even highly niche'd professionals should have exposure to cultures outside of their own, if only for the benefit of becoming better at their specialty. Language, after all, is communication and is what allows us to reach one another and ourselves.
Take accounting for example. I once heard Mark Cuban say that a good entrepreneur must understand accounting because even when he or she hires a professional accountant, the accountant still has to communicate accounting problems to the entrepreneur. An accountant is useless if he or she cannot communicate with anyone, and the businessperson is ineffective without a basic understanding of finance. Learning a foreign language opens the door to so many other areas of understanding, despite the times it may be necessary to hire a translator for languages you don't know — still pick one and intentionally apply a part of yourself toward it for the irreplaceable benefits.
I'm not saying you need to dedicate endless amounts of time and energy to this endeavor, but I am saying it's worth committing to practicing a language you are not fluent in, under these 2 conditions:
It should be practiced on a consistent basis for at least a few months, more consistently than whatever requirement you haphazardly met for high school. (If you've already done this, do it again. Foreign language activation should be incorporated in your life regularly).
Your personal (and, ideally, professional) interests should be the skeleton of the target language material you consume. In other words, you aggressively tailor your learning to your own needs as opposed to any external, generalized curriculum.
Of course, at least basic math and science topics are equally important to continue practicing and engaging with. I recently started using a site that allows me to practice daily math problems without pen and paper — just a few minutes everyday is my minimum, and I do this because I've noticed that getting better at calculating percentages and other equations in my head is very useful for business and everyday life. There's also no shortage of interesting scientific discoveries happening in the world. In short, being a curious person means you have to always be learning about different topics, but this includes the "soft" skills. The arts and humanities help reveal what drives us as people, and language and communication are integral parts to this. Foreign language is inherently valuable because you'll immediately be exposed to concepts you've never seen before while discovering similarities to what is familiar.
I can't emphasize enough the benefits of acquiring a foreign language (check out some of my older blogs about this for more depth). Once you successfully achieve whatever proficiency you want, in the language of your choosing, it will forever be an invaluable part of your education that can never be taken away from you, and your new language skill sets will better connect you to yourself and more parts of the world.
I hope you enjoyed this one. Have a good weekend!
-Thomas