The modern education system is great at one thing:
Training people into replaceable jobs.
This was a realization I had before I went to college. I knew that even if I went, finding the right career for me wasn’t over when graduation came around.
I had 2 options if I wanted to make more than enough money to eliminate the problems that come from money:
Option 1:
- Climb the corporate ladder
- Use my skills to build someone elses business
- Sacrifice my wants and time for a higher paycheck
Option 2:
- Create my own ladder
- Use my skills to build my own business
- Sacrifice my free time for leverage toward my goals
I’m being dramatic here, of course.
I’ve been self-employed for 3-4 years now and I am extremely out of touch with most things. I have a distorted perception of corporate work and am well aware of that.
From what I’ve seen, there are few lines of work that have a shred of the benefits that self-employment do.
Ample rest, pursuing an intrinsic hierarchy of goals, not sitting in front of artificial blue light for 8 hours, the pursuit of mastery and the deep sense of satisfaction that comes with it… the list goes on.
The human psyche, general health, and the basic need for self-actualization are pushed under the rug for the sake of making a predictable amount of money.
This doesn’t make sense when good dopamine comes from hunting for your own survival, pursuing the goals you set, and achieving mastery in the skills you choose — not someone that offers to hold your hand toward their goals.
How do you prevent or escape this reality?
Skill acquisition, building a creative income source, and adopting the value of self-sufficiency.
But there’s more.
The internet has leveled the playing field.
People of all experience levels are solving their own problems, learning new skills, and posting their findings online in an engaging way.
This kills 4 birds with one stone.
- Learning leverage building skills through experience (like writing, persuasion, and other marketable skills that come with building a brand)
- Building digital leverage (a following, network, and digital real estate that lives online forever)
- Studying the interests they truly want to pursue (and learning about them by organizing their ideas and posting online)
- Offering help to those 1-2 steps behind them (because people are losing trust in the “system” and want to learn from a human)
The state of modern education has been changing right before our eyes.
Like Bitcoin, education will continue to decentralize.
Creators are the new teachers.
Consumers are the new students.
The New Education System
In reality, what I’m going to teach you is the old education system.
Long before government-supported schools came into play, how did we learn?
From our parents, community, and experiences.
We touched fire, cried for a few minutes, and learned that life implies risk. Some controllable, some the product of self-deception and illusion.
As humans without an expected path to take (for the sake of being a perfect fit into the society that we’ve constructed) we pursued our curiosity, learned from experience, and sought out mentors that could help us accelerate our unique path.
We’ve got it all backward.
Since we were young, we’ve been conditioned to:
- Please others and be graded on performance (rather than what we truly learned)
- Cater to the wants and needs of society (because accepting someone elses ideology is easier than creating our own way of living)
- Limit our own minds to the point of wondering, “Is this all there is?”
This is a disaster.
Go to school, do what you’re told, get a degree, be trained into a replaceable job with a set income that determines your value in society…
Question nothing, only see what’s in front of you, and don’t you dare be better than me! I say I want the best for you… but that’s just a guise to justify my unconscious actions that signal the opposite.
The new education system doesn’t rely on society.
It relies on you.
Self-education is the answer, but nobody knows how to self-educate… and that’s kinda the point.
5 Steps To Take Your Education Into Your Own Hands
We haven’t entered another renaissance era.
Ideas, information, and advice are everywhere.
People are losing trust in religion, government, and forced ideology.
This leaves us in a perpetual state of anxiety and uncertainty. Order has been lost and our minds are hit with the backlash.
In the past, religious doctrine and accepted cultural standards gave us an external hierarchy of goals to pursue. It brought order to our lives. We didn’t have to think about what the future held. A blessing and a curse.
Now, we must take matters into our own hands. Here’s how:
1) Know Thyself
What do you want in your future?
How are you going to get there? What are the goals?
Why do you want to get there? What is important to you?
Contemplate your vision, goals, and values over the next week. Then internalize these next steps.
2) Pursue Your Curiosity
3 things:
- Potential utility
- Potential creativity
- Potential enjoyability
Those are what you should look for when building a profitable skill stack.
Yes, stack. Not singular skill.
This is where most creatives go wrong. You can’t just create art all day and hope someone sees it the way you do.
If you want to pursue an artistic skill, great, do it, but you must be open to offering that skill in a way that helps others get what they want.
Writing, marketing, sales.
Learn those. That gives any other skill you choose to learn utility.
Enjoyability? That comes with the process. Try things out. Throw sh*t at a wall.
3) Start A Personal Project
Projects are powerful.
One, they get you out of tutorial hell, the endless cycle of learning that tricks you into thinking that you are making progress.
Two, they force you to build something that serves a function in the real world.
Keyword: build.
Three, they teach you how to pursue sources of good dopamine. You can make progress, get obsessed, and feel the energy that all great entrepreneurs talk about.
Write a newsletter and uncover the holes in your writing.
Create a banner for your brand and be forced to research tools you can use to create those images.
Build out that “million dollar” app idea that you had last year. It’s not like you can’t look up “how to build an app” on YouTube, do some digging, and spend a few months actually doing it.
Don’t let your mind fool you.
4) Seek Specific Knowledge
Building a project will expose what you don’t know.
Trying to learn everything before you start will only delay this process.
When you hit a wall, find the solution.
Buy a course, watch a YouTube video, ask a specific question to someone you follow on social media, join a community, and overall… just get involved in a digital space that talks about your interests.
That’s the beautiful thing about this “new education system.”
You don’t have to pay a pretty penny to get the answers you need. Everything is out there. People just don’t know what to look up because they haven’t started a project, failed, and been given a reason to look up something specific.
Creators are the new professors, but teach information that the professors can’t teach until the next curriculum update.
5) Take Your Project Public
“Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.” — Archimedes
The internet gives anyone the opportunity to build leverage.
- Personal websites
- Writing and educating on social media
- Building an audience and accepting payments
- Hosting, managing, and distributing your project
The coders of the world have been building solutions for years.
Most people can do whatever they want if they learn the rules, play the game, and be the “man in the arena.”
One thing I want you to know:
You will never ever ever get paid for doing what you love if you don’t have people to support you.
The internet gives you access to any and all people with a wi-fi connection (if you have a strategy and the know-how to get in front of them).
Build your project in public. Talk about your journey. Inspire others. And get the feedback necessary to make it a success.
(And remember, no feedback is still feedback. If something isn’t working, giving up isn’t the solution, clearly.)
Until next time, my friends.
— Dan Koe
What Happened This Week
The 2 Hour Writer is live! We had an incredible launch and 800+ students get access yesterday. Some kind words started flowing in this morning:
If you want to use my writing and content system, consider checking it out.
In Modern Mastery, the personal brand master herself, Sana, posted “How To Collaborate With Top Creators,” a key for growing on socials and meeting the people you look up to.
We also have a brand workshop scheduled for this Wednesday. We will be ripping apart profiles and teaching you how to best present yourself online.
A new YouTube video about 9 steps I would take to start a writing business from scratch just went live.
