You do not learn in college how to learn for the rest of your life and most of us are living in an active state of Post-Collegiate Stress Disorder.
Allow me to go back in time, so I can introduce myself to you.
I ask and do this humbly. We do not know each other all that well yet, but I think my story will resonate with your heart. What I have to share with you can potentially be really valuable to you.
We are going to hop on the bus a few times as it pertains to the topic of Post-Collegiate Stress Disorder/Post-Commencement Stress Disorder (PCSD), and go back and forth in time.
You see, the last couple of years I have been on what The Good Men Project told me they call a “learning journey.”
I will be sharing with you the best of the 350+ books I have read since April of 2015.
At this moment, it averages out to 4.28 books a week.
A lot of people have read a lot of books, so why care about me?
I took you back to 2015 already, so let us travel back to August 3, 2005.
I’d just turned 16 years old.
The years after my parent’s divorce had been excruciating.
I had made every school believe they could not handle me, become chronically depressed, and finally sat in the middle of a street, wishing a car would run me over.
Have you ever had a really tough time before?
I got lucky enough to get sent to a school in Utah that helped teenagers dealing with these kinds of issues and it really changed my life.
I then signed up for junior college and when I did, I wrote a note to the basketball coach, and taped it on his door.
I told him I’d had a vision I was going to transfer to UCLA, the home of John Wooden, and be their manager, that I was willing to give him everything I had to get the experience.
He called me and the next day I was wiping floors for his practice.
One thing led to another and within a year and a half, I transferred to Cal State Northridge. There, I was on the court training John Wall, Paul George, and Reggie Jackson under Don MacLean.
Every single moment of college I did not want to be in it.
Now, a lot of people feel the same way even though they were not experiencing their impossible dream come true at the same time.
That is okay because we have something in common.
Did you ever feel you were wasting time in college?
I do not use or rely on or remember anything I learned in college, and I don’t apply it to my life today.
Can you relate?
Upon graduating, I started pondering what I would do since I had everything I seemingly wanted. I could jump into basketball or take a scholarship to go study Judaism in Jerusalem.
I went to Jerusalem.
There, I learned how to read and study in five variations of Hebrew text, spending from seven in the morning until 10 at night immersed in my studies.
I learned how to learn.
The ancient sages said that if you learn something and do not retain it, it is as if you did not learn it at all.
What a pearl, what wisdom we can find in that.
What would they think about college today?
College was for my degree.
Jerusalem was for God.
I could learn for me.
There are so many books out there, so how do you know what to read right here and right now?
It was during this time in my life that I heard Obama say “You may read a book today that you do not use right now. But it may be the book you need in five years.”
How powerful is that?
How mighty is that?
The book you read today may be the book you need in five years.
How come I have been able to retain and use the information I get from books without tests and final exams, or grades, but in college, I could not and did not want to?
Because in books, podcasts, and courses people are sharing the experiences that have worked for them.
It is not some depressed or bored professor who may or may not have had success in the world, and may or may not just need the income they get from teaching, their university benefits, and pension.
For a few bucks, I realized I could purchase the wisdom of experience.
It worked for my friends, too.
My best friend, Binyamin, went from being a quiet, shy, and anxious young man who had settled for a customer service job, to becoming the leading account executive on a team of 50 at one of the top startups in his city. He now earns more than six figures and has six timed his income in just two years, while getting married and having a son.
We are finding ourselves subject to a system that does not account for and is not up to speed with the current world.
With the world, it is releasing its students into.
One with technology, social media, global teams, and entrepreneurship growing every day.
If I am in business school, why in the world would I not have learned about advertising on Facebook?
Why would I not learn about how to set up a more productive system using Evernote?
Why would I not be shown that by using any online job board or hiring people you know and trust, you could get a business off the ground faster than ever before at six times less than an entry-level American job? You can achieve this by hiring people around the world who actually study practical subjects in college, allowing you to grow your own life and/or service clients effectively.
If you keep going about your daily life but do not invest in yourself, nothing will change.
If you do not change, nothing will change.
If you begin to see the things around you differently, everything around you will look different.
Yes, you are busy, stressed, and want to have fun.
But, if you want to have more of what you want and crave in the areas of Spirituality, Relationships, Productivity, and Health, you have to learn how.
Reading so many books only took me eight hours a week.
That is just over an hour a day.
Do you waste an hour a day?
More?
I did, too.
The way to recover and prosper is to learn.
Every single day.
In the coming articles, I am going to share with you the best books I have read. I strongly encourage you to start reading for a half hour a day.
You will see, over time, everything will change.