EDUCATION AND MONEY

Your wealth can only grow to the extent you do.
— T. Harv Eker

The Importance of Spending Your Money on Education and Personal Development

Spend More Money on Your Education

 and Personal Development

than on Your Next Hairstyle

Most people in Western society have no qualms about utilizing hard-earned money — and often going into debt big time — for the latest furniture, clothing, cars, and electronic goods. They will even purchase gadgets and trinkets that add absolutely nothing to their happiness and satisfaction.

But will they part with some of their cash for educational products that could help them become more successful in life? It has been my experience that over 95 percent won’t.

You may be a redneck if . . . you have spent more on your pickup truck than on your education.
— Jeff Foxworthy

If you have never done this, attend a two- or three-day motivational event sometime soon. One thing will stand out among the array of successful and polished speakers: They all will say that their success and polish is due to the books they have read, the seminars they have taken, and the mentors with
whom they have worked. Surprisingly, most will also admit that they were miserable failures early in their lives.

Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.
— Sir Claus Moser

Take, for example, John Assaraf. He was the leader of a street gang when he was nineteen. Assaraf wanted to change his life but he didn’t know how. “I got a job selling real estate,” says Assaraf, “and fortunately someone took me to a sales training seminar.” He has spent over $500,000 on seminars and coaching in the twenty-five years since then. It seems like a fortune — and it is until you learn that his current net worth is over $1 billion! The return on Assaraf’s investment in education has been approximately 2,000 percent.

Economics 101 won't get you off welfare, but at least you will know why you are there.
— Graffiti at a university

If you want to be more successful in life, spend more on your personal development than on your next hairstyle. It was the irreverent Jeff Foxworthy who stated, “You may be a redneck if you have spent more on your pickup truck than on your education.” Redneck or not, you should be spending a certain percentage of your income on your career advancement, self-education, and personal development.

Harv Eker, author of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, advises that you should allocate 10 percent of your after-tax income to self-education. My take on the 10-percent figure is this could be a touch high, particularly if you earn over a million dollars a year. I have allocated 5 percent of my after-tax income to my personal and business education, which works well for me.

Education is a wonderful thing. If you couldn't sign your name you'd have to pay cash.
— Rita Mae Brown

Whether through a book, a magazine article, a seminar, travel to another country, or a conversation with a truly successful person, whatever it is that you undertake, always look to broaden your experiences and your education. This applies regardless of how many college or university degrees you have to your name. It doesn’t matter whether you have finished your  PhD online or simply just your bachelor’s degree. “Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune,” according to Jim Rohn.

It has been my experience that the right educational products such as motivational books, seminars, and CDs can be much more valuable than an MBA for achieving success at what I do. I should know. I have an MBA and have found virtually no material worth reviewing from the courses I took in the program. Yet I find motivational books, seminars, and CDs great resources for reminding me what helped me become successful as an author and publisher.

People commonly educate their children as they build their houses, according to some plan they think beautiful, without considering whether it is suited to the purposes for which they are designed.
— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Of course, you should not take all career and personal development advice as gospel. You do not need to take the techniques to extremes nor do you have to do everything suggested. Advice reflects one particular person’s truth and view of the world. Take whatever useful ideas you need from career and personal development material.

Every book, seminar, or coaching session should have at least one important tool, strategy, or insight. Take what appeals to you and run with it. At the same time discard what doesn’t work for you.

The purpose of education is to keep a culture from being drowned in senseless repetitions, each of which claims to offer a new insight.
— Harold Rosenberg

Your creative mind is your greatest asset and you should be spending money to enhance it. Regardless of the amount you allocate for your career and personal development, this overall point is important: The money you put in your education account is an investment in yourself that can reap unbelievable returns.

In short, search out the best tools available to open up your creative side, get you focused, and direct you toward attaining true success. These tools may cost you a tidy sum at the outset, but they will save you time and make you a lot more money in the long run.

COPYRIGHT © 2013 by Ernie J. Zelinski
 All Rights Reserved

Quotes about the Value and Importance of  Education and Personal Development 

Most people in Western society have no qualms about utilizing hard-earned money — and often going into debt big time — for the latest furniture, clothing, cars, and electronic goods. They will ignore all money saving tips and will even purchase thousands of dollars of gadgets and trinkets each year for which they have absolutely no use at the expense of not having money for retirement.

Here are some quotations about education and money to put things in proper perspective.

I've never been poor, only broke. Being poor is a state of mind. Being broke is a temporary situation.
— Mike Todd

An education obtained with money is worse than no education at all.
— Socrates

Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.
— Karl Kraus

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
— Oscar Wilde

Education is the art of making man ethical.
— Georg Hegel

Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave.
— Lord Brougham

Education. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
— Ambrose Bierce

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.
— Thomas Szasz

Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.
— Friedrich Schlegel

If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?
— Maria Montessori

Americans believe in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
— Evan Esar

Talented people get rich, and blockheads get rich. Intellectually brilliant people get rich, and very stupid people get rich. Physically strong people get rich, and and weak and sickly people get rich. Some degree of ability to think and understand is, of course, essential. But, in so far as natural ability is concerned, any man or woman who has sense enough to read and understand these words can certainly get rich.
— Wallace D. Wattles, in The Science of Getting Rich

If an educational act is to be efficacious, it will be only that one which tends to help toward the complete unfolding of life. To be thus helpful it is necessary rigorously to avoid the arrest of spontaneous movements and the imposition of arbitrary tasks.
— Maria Montessori

Americans believe in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
— Evan Esar

The rules for obtaining money “legally” are available for your study. If you think you want more money, and you are not studying the rules, I conclude that you would rather gripe about not having money, than have it.
— Ron Smotherman writing in Winning Through Enlightenment

It is an axiom in political science that unless a people are educated and enlightened it is idle to expect the continuance of civil liberty or the capacity for self-government.
— Texas Declaration of Independence, 2 March 1836

It is very nearly impossible . . . to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
— James Baldwin

It's fairly obvious that American education is a cultural flop. Americans are not a well-educated people culturally, and their vocational education often has to be learned all over again after they leave school and college. On the other hand, they have open quick minds and if their education has little sharp positive value, it has not the stultifying effects of a more rigid training.
— Raymond Chandler

Let us describe the education of our men. . . . What then is the education to be? Perhaps we could hardly find a better than that which the experience of the past has already discovered, which consists, I believe, in gymnastic, for the body, and music for the mind.
— Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.)

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
— E. M. Forster

The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.
— Allan Bloom

The paradox of education is precisely this- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
— James Baldwin

The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.
— Oscar Wilde

True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality of talent, of genius; for inequality, not mediocrity, individual superiority, not standardization, is the measure of the progress of the world.
— Felix E. Schelling (1858-1945), U.S. educator. Pedagogically Speaking, ch. 8 (1929).

We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), Swiss-born French philosopher, political theorist. Emile, bk. 1 (1762).

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
— Henry David Thoreau

The Money Cafe is brought to you by Ernie Zelinski, an innovator and content creator of best-selling books and websites.

Ernie is the author of the international bestsellers  How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free (over 175,000 copies sold and published in 8 foreign languages) and  The Joy of Not Working (over 250,000 copies sold and published in 17 languages).

 THE MONEY CAFÉ COPYRIGHT © 2014 by Ernie J. Zelinski
 All Rights Reserved