Earning More Money Has LITTLE to Do With Uni Degrees

Let’s play pretend. Let’s say you are a woman, with one beloved son. Just play along. So your son is in From 3 and is having REAL trouble with Math at school. So for the school holidays, you decide to find a tutor for him. Who would you hire:

  1. Mr. Mike – a math professor who teaches at the University
  2. Mr. Bob – a down-to-earth math tutor who specializes in high school math and all your friends and neighbors testify to his ability to tutor high school math.

Who would you hire? My guess is that you, and almost everybody else, would hire Mr. Bob. Would it matter if Mr. Bob never went to uni? I think all that matters is that Mr. Bob can get your son’s grades up, no? How many kids would Mr. Bob need to teach to make huge sums of money at today’s rates?

“Most people are looking for a magic bullet, and rather than trying to figure out how to earn money themselves, they ‘outsource’ it to some university or degree program. That way, the reasoning goes, they can read some books, take a couple tests, get a degree, and…then what? Money falls down from trees?” – Ramit Sethi

Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way! So what if you get a degree? If you want to earn significant amounts of money you have to WORK. You have to work hard at understanding your customers, and presenting yourself in such a way that they will just come to you. Like Mr. Bob did (above).

The alternative is to dream about earning money and do nothing about it. Or worse, get a worthless degree that costs you lots of money but doesn’t help you increase your earnings.

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Comments

  1. Paul Githae says:

    Quite a number of people will be pissed off by this post. Why? Because it points at a trend that is emerging in Kenya. Every second floor of any building in town is now a campus, with Kenyans desperately seeking success through “education”. This is not bad per se. Trouble is, there is a serious disconnect between what is taught in these campuses with what is needed to propel you to real success (not the success of an 8-5 job, but success that is accompanied by a creative contribution to society, to the economy and to yourself).

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