The Uncommon Education

Having an Uncommon Home, Education, and Personal Life – Part 2

The Uncommon Education

There is a common path of education and I’ve found that there is also the uncommon path.  Let’s start with the one you’re most familiar-the common path.

This path consists of, but is not limited to, the following:

  • Education is about how we perform. In other words, can we make the grade or cut.
  • We randomly choose our field of study.
  • We wear our education as a badge of privilege or honor.
  • We use education as another instrument to segregate.

Common is an education that is performance driven.
How we perform in school, be it grade school, collegiate or beyond, is the common theme of education.  Being common subjects us to trying to outperform those around us in every subject.  We try to perform in subjects that are of no interest to us.  We have tests in every class.  And if that wasn’t enough, we have tests to qualify us in continuing on to greater levels of education. Please don’t hear what I am not saying which is that the uncommon don’t need education.  In fact the uncommon or extraordinary value education and use it to continually grow. They just focus it in the area of their calling. Did you know that every person has a unique gift, talent, and craft? The Bible refers to this as an anointing.  A person has an anointing for different skills..so do you.  Common has a performance driven education; the uncommon use education to perform.  You’re anointed for something; we just need to make sure we find what that is.  Once we uncover this, we should then educate ourselves in this area.  If not, you could be educating yourself in the wrong things.

Uncommon Education

The No-longer-common focused learning.
I recently gave a talk regarding focused thought.  Focused thought means you have a concentration.  You narrow down your thinking from broad to specific.  It’s not common for a person to be an expert in a single focus. However, it’s uncommon to be an expert in any particular focus.  Being well-rounded is a sure way to remain ordinary.  You’ve heard it said that you need to have a well-rounded education.  But did anyone ever tell you that this action keeps you from being extraordinary.  Study any successful person and you’ll notice that they all became focused maybe even narrow minded.  They let go of the rounded and diverse thinking in exchange for focused thinking.  More became less.

There’s a saying that was used in the community where I grew up, “Jack of all trades and master of none”.  Ordinary people spend most of their lives trying to master a variety of skills until they’ve never mastered any.  In my profession, I know people, who every time they hear of another good tool-software or app, they immediately change from using the one they were proficient at using.  They never stay with a tool long enough to be good at any of them.

Common is the person who randomly chooses a direction.
Ordinary individuals start out on their journey of selecting a career by making a random selection of majors.  How many people do you know when asked how did you choose your major, had no convincing method of making such a decision?  I chose my major by accident.  I was actually headed in the direction of my giftedness-mathematics.  Only to change because of a classmate who seemed to have it all figured out; so I changed to her field of study which was information systems.  The sad part is that I had never heard of “information systems” in my life and had no idea what I would do with such a degree. It was the hot thing back then. My point is this, normal people give very little focused thought to what they should study.  Without focused thought, a plan, you will become subject to another’s plans for you.  The flip side is what the uncommon do, they determine what they’re good at doing and add education to that making their skills much stronger.

I remember like it was yesterday, walking the campus of the University of Alabama trying to figure out what I had done.  Then it hit me.  I wasn’t like everyone else so I stopped trying to be.  I decided to get back into mathematics through engineering where I fell in love with computers.  You see math led me to my true love, computer science.  I ended up with a degree in information systems and almost a second in computer science.  When you get tired of chasing another’s dreams, you’ll start chasing your own; that’s what it is to be no-longer-common.

Education is what makes the common.
Education doesn’t make the exceptional. Education doesn’t make us who we are.  What our degree or the letters behind or in front of our name affords us, doesn’t rescue us from being ordinary people.  When you find yourselves relying on your educational accomplishments to impress others, you’re still common.  How many doctors, dentists, attorneys, and elected officials do you know who have the same or maybe even worse issues than you?  How often do you hear of a politician caught up in some terrible scandal?  It’s far too common; because it is common.  Educational accomplishments is not a pass that frees you from the disease I call “ordinary”.

Your degree doesn’t make you.  Your level of education doesn’t make you who you are.  Truly exceptional individuals often quit pursuing their degree to pursue their calling so they can leave a mark on the world that a degree would never have afforded them.

Education is no longer a separator when you’re uncommon.
Today in corporate America, education is used to separate people into classes.  Classes like employees from supervisors. Supervisors from managers.  Managers from directors.  Directors from vice-presidents, presidents, CEO’s and so on.  If you pay attention, you probably notice separation in the place where you work.

Allow me to help you put an end to that kind of thinking.  Having an education is great, but it’s not a barrier for those who choose to be no-longer-common.   One of my favorite movies is called  “Something the Lord Made.”  It’s about a lab assistant who didn’t have the education and felt the segregation of not having the degree.  He, however, had much more and made contributions to the world that the degree couldn’t.  This lab assistant was Vivien Thomas who pioneered modern day heart surgery.

What is the world waiting on you to pioneer?  What will you offer the world?  Stop letting the common view of education get in your way of educating others in an uncommon way.

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