8 Essential Skills They Didn’t Teach You In School

How to save and invest, certainly. That’s what my post is about today. Parents often don’t teach it and neither do schools. Children grow up and make big mistakes that they don’t need to.

You say that speed reading and speed comprehension are real, what resources do you recommend to learn this skill? A quick search yields questionable links.

1. How to dress for success.
2. How to interview.
3. How to survive office politics.
4. How to climb the corporate ladder.
5. How to CYA.

To name but a few! Which is why I write about these topics on my blog under the “Easy Steps to Success with Work” category. : )

This article reads like a self-help pamphlet – oversimplifying and misstating many issues.

Take the “How to make people like you and network” paragraph. I think the George Bush example is a good one, but you sort of twisted it around. Networking is the crutch of the incompetent. If you have some level of intelligence, you don’t need to have a lot “networking skills”. Talented people recognize other talented people and networking will come naturally (even for quiet people).

Next, take the “How to speed read and the power of audio books” section. This oversimplifies the process of learning. “Listen to an audio book in the car and you will have learned a semester’s worth of class!” People learn by doing, not by listening – hence the need for exams, homework, projects, and so on.

I really like this section: “How to be successful in life”. “[W]hat makes people happy and successful” are “health, wealth, and relationships”. Are you kidding me? Where do I start. First of all, you cannot equate happiness and success. If anything, these two usually go against each other. Wealth has very little to do with either success or happiness. Did you put any thought at all into this article?

Overall, a rubbish article and I hope no one takes it seriously.

Speed Reading and comprehension are nice. If you do not had learning disabilities that make gaining such tools impossible. And these disabilities are real.

Additionally Passive incomes tend require fairly large sums of money to actually get.

Lastly these things would have increasingly less punch as more people know them. If everyone did this they would have no value. Sadly the basis for Capitalist Economics is the Scarcity of Resources. So if everyone did there probably would still be the same number of so called winners and losers. This is not a attack on Capitalism. However its a circumstance.

A world where everyone is taught to be Type A Personalities could be pretty scary.

@Martin Prince – I used Peter Kump Breakthrough Rapid Reading, you can find it on Amazon it was pretty good

@Mark – thanks thats a typo! I meant to say Yale.

@Shanel Yang – great list I agree. What is CYA?

@ VegeBrain – you’re right, memorization is a big one, using mnemonics and all that.

The other one I forgot to mention is that they don’t teach you how to work in groups in school. They generally teach you to “to your own work” which isn’t how the real world is. Successful people surround themselves with smart people who complement their weaknesses. They are leaders and work in teams much more than they work on their own.

Thanks everyone for the comments!

You said a mouthful there. Our kids are being taught to be slaves and not think VS the real life issues.

Notetaking and study skills should be a required course of all students at the grade school level. Also, a test-taking course is something I only took in my final semester in my undergraduate. It should have been required as part of the first semester or gap summer.

As for the bit about reading financial statements, you are under the (mistaken) assumption that education is designed to level the playing field. You must remember that schools are set up by those in power. Those in power don’t want to lose it, so schools teach only what is needed to be a laborer and not go beyond that. The minority of students who figure this out are allowed to enter the rich boys’ club — and they are mostly men, but the majority are kept as labourers.

Wow, I learned all of these things in school. So I guess this post is wrong.

I couldn’t agree with you more Brian, especially on the first two. Schools apparently expect kids to teach themselves how to influence people and socialize well through recess/activities but this is too important of a skill to not have some formal mandatory instruction in place. The ability to communicate persuasively and make people like you can easily take you further than most other things taught in school. Ultimately rising the corporate ladder is as much about working with people as it is working with your otherwise learned skillsets.

The truth they never taught me in school is that there is nothing that an “expert” knows that I can’t learn. That is, they don’t have an exclusive inroad to knowledge and wisdom.

several great books i have been reading lately:

Dale Carnegie-How to win friends and influence people

Gary Chapman-The 5 Love Languages

Dr. Steve W Price-Household Gold

Author Unknown-The Slight Edge

i don’t know, i never really saw school as a place for being taught life skills. everybody operates differently, so these things won’t function properly in a standardized curriculum. introverts shouldn’t be trained to be extroverted, that’d be like forcing a left-handed child to write with his right hand. there are as many paths to as definitions of success. they can’t possibly all be taught. let’s make schools places to gather knowledge, and let the real world be the source of one’s experience.

Correct English grammar, foreign languages, and mythology. In other words, the classics, without which a person cannot be truly educated. (I don’t care how much money a person makes…if he or she doesn’t know the difference between “its” and “it’s” or “then” and “than,” to me, they know nothing.)

I’m married to a man who speaks 5 languages fluently, plus he speaks & writes English better than any American or Brit I’ve ever met. He was taught Greek, Roman, AND Nordic mythology–combined with geography and history–since 2nd grade. All this was in a tiny third-world country, where he & others are taught social skills at their mother’s knee. Admittedly, he attended private schools, not public.

“How to make people like you,” at the top of Brian’s list, is often thought of as a feminine issue, and is therefore devalued in the U.S., as is “learning to work in groups.”

To VegeBrain: critical thinking is much more than being wary or defensive. It really is analytical thinking, or relating and connecting different areas of knowledge and facts.

Looks like you don’t realize you achieved one other lesson from college – how to teach yourself! Could you have been as proficient at doing something new by “just picking up a couple of books” had you stopped at high school?

Not all colleges and programs are created equal – how did the Engineering or Medicine tracks compare to a Liberal Arts degree? Going one program further, getting an MBA will tour you through all these missed topics. Best bet is to get a technical undergrad degree like Engineering and then an MBA to round out the business side. It’s hard and not for everyone though.

Many of these lessons are more important for the wild-west entrepreneur set than the majority of mid to large size corporate denizens. Having both lived in and interacted with both environments (I own my own company these days) there is a different mindset between the two groups. Most schools and colleges are really “big corporations” and train for that same environment – so they skip many of the subjects that are important to startups and freelancers.

Good ideas here, but “95% of our population retiring at or below the poverty level”??? The poverty rate for seniors in the U.S. is closer to 10%. It’s about 18% for children. The evidence that most folks aren’t saving enough for retirement is pretty good, but they aren’t gonna be eating cat food.

@ anna – I’m a natural introvert and made a concerted effort for about 4 years to fix that because it holds you back in life. I actually got a job bar-tending just because it would force me to get good at talking to strangers. I don’t think you should force people to be what they don’t want to be, but if school is not there to help us become successful at whatever we want to achieve in life, then I don’t see its purpose. Being educated just for education sake has little value.

@ susan – good point

I like your suggestions. Nice concept for a piece. The book links are very handy. Lots of my favorites, as a therapist, are in there (e.g. When I Say No I Feel Guilty). I disagree pretty strongly with half of one. Books on tape—Good call. Speed reading—very questionable. There is a pretty direct trade off between reading speed and comprehension. Vocabulary building, study and reading comprehension skills and critical thinking skills are much better investments of time. The speed reading genre is rampant with charlatans with loads of anecdotal evidence and poorly controlled studies to support their claims and pocket your money. Some are more legit than others, but buyer beware in that market.

I love it; a writer who claims English class was pointless.

If most of what you learned in college was how to talk to girls, that’s you’re own problem, not the policy makers’.

One word. Thanks.

One course I would’ve loved to have taken in University is “Philosophy 101 – Critical Thinking” as I find myself always reading comments of an article to see what I should think about it.

Having our own conclusions would be much more beneficial instead of being taught to take in whatever information was given to us from our teachers and automatically believe it as correct or legit – some doubt would be much better to have than complete trust into someone else’s thoughts/opinions(without knowing their sources of information). Students in my old High School class would take some dirty looks when questioning or doubting the teachers.

Again – like someone else has mentioned – parenting is the LARGEST part of a child’s life, and much of the learning process should be done from their side. Having public education and the lack of a tutor would lose out on the personal aspect of teaching – it’s unreasonable to think that a teacher will be able to learn everything about their students and teach them what they need to know individually.

@Deneen – I would have to disagree with you on that one, I don’t think matters of faith have any place in school

Excellent article, Brian.

Best,

TJK

I agree, the school systems, well most of them, are terrible. I believe self-help and personal development should be taught in school.

I wouldn’t go as far as saying you are alone in your educational experience, because you are by far not, but I would suggest you look at where you went to school. A lot of schools do teach you the skills you mentioned.

I should have made that more clear.

so difficutly find a list like this,it’s great.you know what’s the methods to see a english arcitle for a Chinese,first ,I must translate it to chinese.so I must look every words and found that at last it’a not correlative.

It looks very useful,but I don’t like study.maybe I can have a try.

I like your suggestions. Nice concept for a piece. The book links are very handy.

I think Teachers should actually teach. I even had this problem again in college. I don’t understand what the problem is. Perhaps it’s just the state of Georgia which I always hear is like 50th in the nation. But gosh how do you call yourself a teacher and then just read out of the textbook and assign work? I am very annoyed by the school system and felt it was a complete waste of time. On top of that. I have spent $15k to try to further my education to no avail. The only thing I have learned is that if you want to learn something you have to learn it for yourself. And that I think is a horrible thing we doing for ourselves as people. Parents blame the schools. Schools blame parents. And then when that’s not good enough. You blame the church for not teaching ethics. Makes sense though. Nobody wants to take responsiblity for anything. Well this is why I’m approaching 30 and can’t make it in this world.

good article, Thanks for your sharing this information

good article, i like, Thanks for your sharing this information

How to speed read and the power of audio books and How to be successful in life. I very like this two post.

8 Essential Skills They Didn’t Teach You In School

We must have the skills

understanding of the world and making me sound smart at cocktail parties, I can’t think of anything in there that I really use on a day to day basis. That’s problematic. The problem, of course, is that these things, for the most part, aren’t being taught in a way that makes them dynamic and applicable in daily life.

I also forgot to mention, I wish schools actually teach you how to survive in the world today, how to be able to get work, and live on your own, how to manage your money, and other sorts. its sad what schools arent teachign students when they should be teaching you how to live a full successfull and happy life.