My wife, Ann, has recently gone back to school. There is a university in Idaho (Brigham Young University Idaho or BYUI) with an incredible distance learning program. It is designed for adults who wonder if maybe it is time to get their degree.
Ann started college when she was 19. She didn’t finish. Not having a degree has never been a clear problem for her. It probably never would be. That made it difficult for her to decide to go back. College is expensive. It is time consuming. It is much more difficult to go back as an adult. Why bother now?
Why invest in learning when you don’t seem to need it?
One reason: because we believe in being biased to learn. While learning is often practical you often can’t anticipate the practical uses of everything you learn.
One common student complaint has always irked me: when am I ever going to use this? It is so unimaginative and petulant that it’s hard to take seriously. I’ve recently seen an article where the author tries to disarm the questioner with the unexpected answer, ”you never are going to use this.” The author then emphasizes that you learn so that you can learn to learn. That approach to the question is imaginative. I think it gives up too much ground to the doubters.
Instead, we should borrow from a hackneyed sports aphorism: you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take. The coach shouting that at his player is trying to get them to forget their player stats for a minute and just take a shot. Throw the ball!
You might never ”use” the thing you’re learning right now. But I guarantee that you’ll never use 100 percent of the things you never learn. Learn nothing and be useless.
Many things you study in your life will seem to have no obvious use. But you can’t be creative without knowing a lot of seemingly useless stuff. As Steve Jobs is credited with saying, ”Creativity is just connecting things.” You can’t make connections as an ignoramus. You have to learn, experience, and notice things. Some of the most impactful discoverys were connections made across disciplines.
Ann is really early in the program. But already she has seen new uses for what she has learned. It has made her more effective at life, not simply prepared for an entirely new life. We never thought that going back to school would be the perfect preparation for serving this past week in the school. We didn’t weigh the cost of tuition saying, “boy, if you went back to school you would have more skills for red ribbon week.” And yet the skills she has acquired in class have been directly helpful this week.
Of course, college isn’t the only place to learn. And you have to keep learning whether or not you’ve gone to college.
If you’re afraid that learning something will be a waste of time, you are likely limiting yourself. That’s only a respectable objection if you are going to use that learning time on something more valuable, like delivering results, or learning something better, or taking your child to the zoo.
