© Elliot Essman 2005. All rights reserved.

These pages contain the complete 2005 revised text of Building Yourself, public speaking trainer Elliot Essman's guide to living the successful life.

Elliot Essman Public Speaking Training
Building Yourself Table of Contents
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• The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things—the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit. Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)

The right way is to use educational resources to mold your education according to your own temperament, your own abilities and your own perception of economic realties (which we hope is realistic). You cannot depend on anyone else to do this for you. You must do it yourself.

The way traditional schools operate changes very slowly; the world changes rapidly. The goal of many educational institutions is often self‑perpetuation. Your education may come in a distant second.

There's another factor too. Schools are for the average person. You, the achiever, are not average; you're exceptional. Schools churn out a standardized product for standardized career paths—often the career paths of the past. You do need schooling, you might need a degree, but you need much more to ensure that you get a true education.

Financial considerations aside, schools also turn out the intellectual product of the past. Art, literature, philosophy and the other fields also move at astonishing speeds. Everything does. To ensure that you become and remain a well‑rounded, culturally enriched person (and you should), you have to take matters into your own hands. Schools are filled with impressive‑seeming people ready to give you bad advice that can set you back years.

Depending on an educational institution for your education is quite similar to depending entirely on the police for your personal protection. Oh, you're glad the police are there, and they can be very helpful in many instances. But you still lock your door at night and take responsibility for your own personal safety. You've got to take the same kind of personal responsibility for your education.

Educate yourself at schools only when you can generate a provable benefit as opposed to using the same time getting life experience somewhere else. As an exceptional, highly successful person, you'll be involved in lifelong learning. As a result, you'll have lifelong chances to enrich yourself. This doesn't mean you teach yourself everything and listen to nothing from anyone else; it does mean that you take charge of the direction of your education.

The problem—call it the trap—is that a young person, even a young person of ability, may not have the perspective, the judgment or the experience to make up his or her own mind about educational and career paths. It's not just a case of a parent or guidance counselor telling the young person, “You do this and study that,” or “You go and get such and such a degree and then apply for such and such a job.” It's more a matter of people who are not attuned to the pace of change in the modern world imparting opinions and prejudices to impressionable young minds. In a subtle way, the young person takes on the ideas of the past as his or her own.

One concrete example: Mary D. majors in art history in a liberal arts college, following exactly the course her mother took. Why not? Her mother was interested in art history, then graduated and was able to find a good job at an art gallery during the mid‑1970's. Upon graduating, Mary D. enters law school. She does no real research on where the jobs are, or what the best fields for the twenty-first century are. Mary's uncle went to law school and was taken into a firm on graduating even though his grades were mediocre. Mary's knows her grades will be superlative. She tells her uncle about her plans and he gives her encouragement. She throws herself into her studies.

Mary graduates law school with top honors, but like most of her fellow students she can't find the kind of job she thought would be there waiting for her. She takes a job as a legal researcher while she searches for the exciting kind of work she's seen on television.  She's twenty-eight now, with no real career skills, and no real direction. She's worked hard, but she is not succeeding because she hasn't thought for, or relied upon, herself. She has fallen into the trap of taking on the world of others, a world they're comfortable with, and applying it to herself.

A second concrete example: Mary's friend Jessica goes to the local library one rainy Saturday afternoon, searches in the business periodical database for the keyword “careers” and discovers several articles on the subject in a major business newsweekly. She is intrigued to learn that there is long‑term growth potential in the restaurant and hotel management industries, but she's really not interested in doing that kind of work. Opportunities in telecommunications, however, cause her to think, even though she, too, has a deep interest in art history. She asks her high school guidance counselor about the telecommunications field. The counselor doesn't know anything about the field off hand, but does some research.

Jessica majors in communications in college and yet satisfies her deep interest in art by taking numerous courses and seminars. After graduation, she takes an entry level job in the telecommunications department of a major corporation. The corporation later finances her graduate degree in communications, and sends Jessica to conferences and other continuing education. Jessica learns on the job while Mary is immersed in legal studies; Jessica also begins earning her own money three years earlier than Mary, who is piling on additional student loans.

At twenty-eight, Jessica has a flourishing career. She's not wealthy yet, but she's going in a positive direction at a satisfying pace. One Saturday afternoon, Jessica invites Mary to attend an art seminar at a major museum she is a member of. Afterwards, they have lunch. Jessica takes the check.

A person who takes charge of his or her education can get more out of the educational institution than a person who doesn't, but only a fool rests the quest for knowledge on a college degree. Nearly anyone can get a college degree these days, and use it as the basis for a life of underemployment and frustration.