Education is so important because it frees you to do what you want. A good education makes you see the world completely differently, I even say that it is the only way to really appreciate the beauty of the world. As an extreme, imagine an illiterate person, someone who does not recognize letters, cannot read them here, cannot record them and therefore cannot understand them. This idea is not that extreme at all, because in Germany, a rich western industrial nation, about 4% or 2 million adults are completely illiterate and 14% or 7 million adults are functional illiterates.
Can you even imagine what world these people live in? Finding a job, doing any administrative work, filling out contracts or just shopping in the supermarket? Try to imagine (or really test) what it would be like if you couldn’t read for a week or a day. The world would be completely different.
1. You don’t lose the connection
Digitization is a big factor in the rapid changes in our society. In business, this can be seen, for example, in self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, and robots that perform brain surgery. Developments that were not even imaginable a few years ago. But digitization is also more than present in the small. Communication via smartphone, paying bills with one click, booking flights online – you can certainly think of hundreds of things that you do naturally nowadays via the app or on the Internet. For the digital natives, all of this works very intuitively and without much thought, for the generation of Silver Surfer, for example, just operating a smartphone is quite a challenge. Clear, if you have never had something like this in your hand before and you should suddenly understand what is hidden behind the small, colorful boxes on the screen. But even if you grew up on the Internet, it is helpful to stay up-to-date with new developments. So you can be sure that you will not lose touch and that you will still have a clear perspective in a few years, for example in terms of technology.
2. You are not sitting silently in conversation
Those who know a lot can have a say – and that makes conversations much more exciting. Imagine meeting friends who exchange ideas that one of them was finally able to get his team excited about agile work. And now he is planning the first sprints for the new project, has set up a Kanban board in the meeting room and is really excited to see how the iterations will go. And you sit in silence because you’ve never heard of agile project management. Of course, we cannot acquire in-depth specialist knowledge for every conceivable area, but a few background information and a broad general education ensure that you can follow up on conversations in a targeted manner and thus automatically take more of what your counterpart tells you. A clear win-win situation for both sides!
3. You keep your head young
Learning has exactly the effect on the brain. Because if you always give your head new content, it has something to do permanently, and that keeps your upper room young and dynamic. So exactly what happens when you give your body movement. Solving a sudoku every day is a good approach, but it is actually not enough because the mind needs different exercises. Instead of regularly refreshing what is already known, it is best to try to learn new content again and again – regardless of whether this is further training for your job or basic know-how about the agile project management of your buddy.
