Why Practical Intelligence almost always beats Academic Intelligence
I will like to state that everything I will be talking about in this article was gotten from a book, titled:
The Education of Millionaires: It’s not what you think and it’s not too late by Michael Ellsberg
“[A] whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” — Ishmael in Moby-Dick
It is a lie that your good grades in a good college to get a good degree, will definitely guarantee your success in life. This might have been the case about half a century ago.
If you want to succeed now, then you must educate yourself in real world skills and mind-sets that will get you ahead outside the classrooms.
There are, of course many wonderful things you can learn in College, which have absolutely nothing to do with career and financial success. You can expand your mind, sharpen your critical thinking skills, get exposed to new ideas and perspectives, revel in the intellectual and cultural legacy of the world’s greatest thinkers. These are all worthy pursuits.
But the idea that simply focusing on these kinds of things, and getting a BA (Bachelors) attesting to the fact that you have done them, guarantees you will be successful in life is going the way of company pensions, job security, and careers consisting of a single employer for 40 long years (perhaps 30–35 years in the Nigerian context). More and more people — including people who haven’t even graduated from College yet — are waking up to the reality that the old career and success advice is no longer adequate. We need to start taking some new advice!
A very typical example in this book is that of a man (Bryan Franklin) who dropped out of school while pursuing a degree in Film and Theatre, who had consciously worked on himself for over a decade by learning things that would make him successful. Within those years he learnt sales, marketing, leadership, finance and accounting — within the context of owning real-world businesses, with his own business at stake. He is a very successful business man, the sound design business he started in College was doing very well. Over 300 hundred feature films were edited or mixed in his studio, including: Gladiator, The Last Samurai and Artificial Intelligence.
Bryan Franklin needed an assistant, so he posted on Craigslist and within 24 hours he had about 200 responses including people with Bachelors, Masters, PhDs and MBAs. Amongst the MBAs, a man with an MBA from Harvard was called for the interview.
Bryan said, “He came to my house in a 3-piece suit. I was talking about the website he will doing data entry for 10 dollars per hour, he was stuck in a very 1999 mentality about the internet (this was in 2002 by the way). He was just talking about liquidity and about the need to be strategic about which relationships I can leverage….” And he goes on and on and on with building priority matrix and all that. I am sure you know without me saying, that he didn’t get the job! A lady who was a High-School dropout got the job, she had a great work ethic and lots of street smarts! She ended up doing a terrific job over three years, she got several raises and eventually started managing about 3 people.
Bryan had focused his self-education on outside of class on what some researchers call “Practical Intelligence” — how to get things done effectively in the real world a.k.a street smarts.
The other man, the Harvard MBA, had presumably studied the same material as Bryan did, but he did so in an abstract, theoretical way. To get through such hallowed educational grounds, the focus of his education was probably on “Academic Intelligence.”
Both men were undoubtedly well-educated, but one man’s education consisted — I am guessing — primarily of theory, which is the stuff most readily on tap in Colleges and Universities. The other man’s education was (and it was self-education, not obtained in a formal classroom) consisted primarily of practice. One man’s education was bureaucratic, formal and by the books; the other man’s education was gained on the front lines, often at the brink of personal disaster. One man was educated in the most prestigious institution in the land, the other in the school of hard business knocks. One man had focused on book smarts, the other street smarts.
Which kind of smarts do you think win in an economic downturn? Which wins when the economy picks up again?
I myself (Michael Ellsberg) I have placed different small odd jobs advert on Craigslist and I can say this for sure that, there is literally no job too shitty or low-paying that you won’t get a river of BAs desperately asking you for the work.
These degree-bearing applicants have attained the very thing society, their Parents, their teachers and everyone else around them told them they needed to attain in order to be successful-a credential certifying their achievement in academic intelligence. And yet, in Bryan’s case, the comparatively tame recession of the early 2000s had hundreds of these BAs, MAs, JDs, PhDs and MBAs lining up for a $10 per hour job posted by a scruffy young business owner (Bryan Franklin) without a College degree.
Is this really the best life advice we can give our young people? Shouldn’t we ask ourselves if our advice couldn’t use a bit of updating and refining?
PS: This is an excerpt from the introduction of a book I am currently reading, written by Michael Ellsberg. I will like reiterate that, this is not my book at all, I am just sharing what I read with you. I own no rights over this book/article. You can get the book from Amazon.
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