Category: Musing

Simon Sarris shares his views on the U.S. education system in his latest article School Is Not Enough. What a pleasure to find someone else has eloquently written down the thoughts floating around in my mind.

Here’s a taste to whet your appetite:

Mass schooling attempts a systematization of skill and knowledge transfer. The results are predictably mediocre—systems at scale must function with and cater to the lowest common denominator, and the process of standardization loses all sensitivity to context. Since everyone must do the same things, it is difficult for any student to do exceptional things. This is alarming on its own for wasting people’s youth. But even worse, in having so many years of life monopolized, people come to inadvertently believe that skill and knowledge transfer are primarily the domain of school rather than a normal consequence of meaningful work.

Simon Sarris

Excerpted from Don’t Start A Side Hustle! by Brian Page:

You want to hear something that will piss you off? If you get a college degree today, your chance of finding a job quickly after graduating is about the same as winning a coin toss. The data shows that nearly half of college grads are still looking for work a year later¹ with many graduates searching years before landing their first post-degree job.

For those who do find work, only one in four will find a job that’s in any way related to the major they chose,² and a full 40 percent of them will land a job that doesn’t even require a degree in the first place!³ That’s insane.

[1] Michelle Fox, “Out of Work and Desperate: Here’s What College Graduates Are Facing and What They Can Do About It,” CNBC, April 15, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/15/what-college-graduates-can-do-about-being-out-of-work.html.

[2] Brad Plumer, “Only 27 Percent of College Grads Have a Job Related to Their Major,” Washington Post, May 20, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/20/only-27-percent-of-college-grads-have-a-job-related-to-their-major/.

[3] Elizabeth Redden, “41% of Recent Grads Work in Jobs Not Requiring a Degree,” Inside Higher Ed, February 18, 2020, https:// www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2020/02/18/41-recent-grads-work-jobs-not-requiring-degree.

Excerpted from Don’t Start A Side Hustle! by Brian Page

I’d like to share my definition of wealth. Wealth is an abundance of passive income, discretionary time, and free choice. Breaking it down further, passive income is defined as cash flow that requires minimal labor to earn or maintain. Discretionary time is the hours available each day to spend as we see fit. Free choice is the amount of free agency we have to be, do, and have what we want in life. Here it is put simply:

PASSIVE INCOME

+

DISCRETIONARY TIME

+

FREE CHOICE

=

TRUE WEALTH