Read time - Less than 5 minutes
School lied to you: That life is a smooth transition from high school to college.
Life doesn't transition, it knocks you down and puts you through a roller coaster.
Today, I’m going to share the problems with conventional education and how to navigate through the roller coaster of life.
Have you seen marketing materials from institutions?
They say things like:
Make your ambitions a reality
Get the best start
Choose who you want to be
Be ahead of the game
Give a passion greater purpose
After spending 4 years acquiring a degree, taking huge student loans and grinding through textbooks…
Graduates still feel lost.
How is this possible?
How is it that these institutions advertise preparing students for the future yet don’t seem to deliver?
The problem lies in the lack of preparation for 3 things:
1) Mindset & Psychology
Schools don’t prepare the mindset of students.
They are too focused on getting students to pass assignments and exams, but they don’t teach holistic skills like how to:
Handle setbacks
Learn from failures
Experiment and tinker
One tip I always give to young adults is to learn the concept of amor fati.
Amor fati = Love of one's fate
It means to know that whatever happens (good or bad) is good for you.
That every painful experience you had was a need to grow into someone better.
Compare falling when young versus age 50.
Which is harder to recover?
2) Career Planning and Job Hunting
There are indeed career centres set up in most institutions, but what they teach is mostly outdated knowledge.
For example, they tell you to draft a long CV, white lie, oversell yourself, exaggerate your experiences, focus on dressing well for interviews…
In real life (verified by recruiters), they want things like:
Drafting a concise résumé that can beat the ATS (Applicant Tracking System)
Crafting a portfolio
Making yourself discoverable online
3) Personal Finance
Schools lack personal finance lessons.
Even if they do, they are mostly from biased educators like financial advisors, bankers, and insurance agents.
It’s not wrong to invite them to give talks and run roadshows per se…
Yet when all of them come with the agenda to promote their investment products, how can students have a clear understanding of this topic?
For me, I have always recommended using the simple 60/20/20 rule.
It works by allocating your income to:
60% Expenses (Spending, monthly bills, food, transport etc.)
20% Savings (Not your childhood bank account, but in a high-yield account that promises a higher return rate).
20% Investments (Not in a house, but in low-cost diversified assets like index funds)
The most important takeaway here is to understand and trust yourself.
I can't emphasize enough that most of life's confusing moments can be solved if you simply give yourself a chance to make your own decisions (which comes with mistakes).
To recap, here are the 3 things you can do to make the transition from school to real-life:
Focus on building a strong mindset. Amor fati is a good starting point.
Learn how to job hunt and use methods that work for today, not the past.
Manage your finances in simple ways, it doesn’t have to be complicated.
Wishing you the best.
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