The Biggest Lesson I Learned From Dropping Out
A lot of people view education as purely about school, college, and university. It’s all about working towards qualifications at a formal institution.
I’ve never seen it that way. Because, from a young age, I understood that education is not just about school. It’s not about the letters after your name. It is not solely what happens in the first two decades of your life.
Instead, education is about what you choose to do when no one is forcing you. It’s about how you spend the early hours of the morning or the late hours of the evening. It’s about what you pursue because the idea of not getting better at it every single day is agony.
It’s about the passion you feel as you inch closer to attaining mastery in your chosen area. It’s about stumbling down rabbit holes and following tangents for the love of it. It’s about what you do, not what you’re made to do.
Whatever serves that purpose for you is your education, regardless of the form it takes.
You educate yourself. No one else can do it for you. No one can implant a chip in your brain containing all the knowledge you need. No one can hand it to you. It’s an entirely personal process.
It’s what you do on train journeys. It’s what you listen to first thing in the morning. It’s what you read before bed. It’s the people you seek out and the conversations you have with them. It’s about your perspective on everything that happens to you: either as an event or as an opportunity to learn.
You marinade your brain in what matters to you.
As I wrote in a previous post, every one minute a day you habitually spend reading adds up to at least one book per year, even if you’re a relatively slow reader.
People who are obsessed with learning do everything they can to squeeze out those minutes, whether it’s for reading or something else that helps them learn, because they know that it all adds up.
Studying formally is one part of the picture. But considering how you invest your time and energy is a big part too.
Ultimately, even when you’re in school, you spend more time out of it than in it. And those hours make the difference. I can’t imagine paying to study something that I don’t care enough about to want to devote my non-class time to learning more about.
Qualifications are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.
They’re meant to signify learning, but they’ve become a simulacrum of learning, a symbol replacing the object. Before anyone intentionally misconstrues my point here, I’m not saying anything about the actual value of qualifications here, I am saying that they are not, in themselves, an education.
In some fields, especially the one I work in, qualifications have ceased to truly signify competence. It takes a lot more to prove yourself — namely, being able to show that you understand how it all plays out in the real world.
The gulf between practice and execution is too wide. If you can prove that you can execute, no one cares what’s on your resume, unless they’re the type to also care about how you dress and how white your smile is and how willingly you acquiesce to the old rules. I am trying not to succumb to that. I am trying to focus on the doing part.
Most of what you know today will be disproved or proven redundant in a decade or two. Your grandchildren will look back at what you learned in school and laugh. Your textbooks will wring tears of hysteria from their eyes.
Yet we sometimes think that having a certificate means you’ve learned all there is to learn. The pace at which humanity discards old knowledge is only speeding up.
I wasn’t strictly qualified to get on to my university course because I didn’t take English Literature for A-level. I took English Communication & Culture. The curriculum seemed like it would teach me more and ultimately it was the most useful class I’ve ever taken.
But they called me in for an interview. It turned out the interviewer taught Nabokov (and no, I didn’t know that beforehand, I had no idea who I’d be speaking to.) I’d just read a few books of his short stories, started talking and it turned out I knew stuff about Nabokov he didn’t.
I got a place on the course.
Or, another time when I was 13, I met someone who claimed they’d read every single book in English about Queen Victoria. Coincidentally, I was in the middle of reading a book that analysed a series of stories the queen wrote as a child, so I pulled it out my backpack. They were pissed off to find they hadn’t heard of it.
I’m giving those examples not to show that I’m particularly clever (I’m not), but that whenever we think we know everything about something, someone comes along and shows us that we’re wrong.
Recently, I saw a doctor who, in the span of 15 minutes, pulled an up to date medical textbook off a shelf half a dozen times to corroborate what they were saying. Some people might find that concerning, but I trust them 10x as much as I would a doctor who just assumes everything they remember from medical school is still correct.
Otherwise you end up with the dietician I saw a couple of years ago who was still under the impression that multivitamins, full-sugar sodas, and margarine are all completely healthy for everyone.
I don’t have qualifications to do the talking for me, as a shorthand for competence. Which means I have to focus on actually proving myself. It means I have to be good at what I do, not good at passing exams. It means I devote hours every single day to studying and practising. I don’t ever stop learning and I filter everything I do and everything that happens through that lens.
So when people tell me I was wrong to drop out because education is important, I laugh. Learning matters more to me than anything else. I’ve just chosen the more efficient route for me: direct experience.
I knew I wanted to be a writer by the time I was, at the latest, about 6.
I don’t remember a time when I knew how to put words on a page without knowing that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. But I also knew that much of what it takes to be a writer can’t be taught in school.
In primary school, I devoured books with a hunger I’ve never felt for anything else. I sometimes read up to 100 per month. I’d finish the assigned work, then sneak out of class to the library or read under my desk. I wrote a lot too, but mostly I read and dictated stories in my head.
In secondary school, I realised that blogging was the future and could give me a way to get direct feedback from an audience, to learn in the public arena. So I started my first site at 13-ish and spent as much of my time as I could writing, taking pictures, learning about design, marketing, and more. At holidays and weekends I produced zines, ran an e-commerce store, entered writing competitions and wrote for any publication that would accept my work.
I loved college, though. I was the happiest I’ve ever been and probably ever will be. For once, I felt like what I did in class taught me more than what I did outside it.
Which is why going on to take an English Literature degree after college seemed like the unquestionable, logical progression. It was expected by my teachers, family, everyone around me. I got offers from every university I applied to and opted for one in the Russell Group.
Then I surprised everyone, including myself, by leaving in the first year.
Looking back, it’s scary how naive I was at that point.
I was 19 and frequently mistaken for a 14 year old. Two years later and people always guess that I’m more like 30.
I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have a clue about how hard it would be — or rather, how hard I would make it for myself. If I’d know, I honestly don’t think I would have done it.
I wanted to do stuff, not to learn how to do stuff that wouldn’t be relevant by the time I graduated. Part of me expected to return the following September once I discovered I couldn’t do it.
A good metaphor for the distinction between theory and practice comes from Peter Korn in Why We Make Things And Why It Matters:
Two Septembers have passed since then.
Each time, because they haven’t removed me from the database, I get a deluge of emails about class times, textbooks, clubs, events, meetings with personal tutors.
I close my eyes and think about how much simpler it would be to back. I miss having holidays, days off and weekends. I miss being able to cross off everything on a to-do list and then stop. I miss relaxing or slacking off once in a while. I miss the social side.
Despite the temptation to give up and go back, leaving university was the best decision I’ve made. It taught me a lot, but the most significant lesson I’ve learned is that we have to treat education as a personal, unrelenting, lifelong process. There’s no shortcut or universal road map. My path proved to be different to what I expected.
I won’t go into everything that has happened in the last two years because I like to keep my work separate from my blogging. But suffice to say, despite the failures, the wasted months, hundreds of panic attacks and sleepless nights, I have plenty to be proud of, both professionally, personally and creatively.
It’s aged me, though mostly in a good way. I’m infinitely more grateful. More appreciative. Less selfish. Less delusional. Less self-destructive. More of a realist. I understand that the most important rules are always the unspoken ones. That I’m going to get old, instead of harbouring the delusion that I can remain green forever. I know what it’s like to half kill yourself over something and fail. To do everything right and fail. I know what it’s like to be utterly alone. I’m proud of the amount I’ve learned, despite all it’s cost me.
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The Biggest Lesson I Learned From Dropping Out
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