… if your Mother ran it?
In my case it’d be just great. Ok, so in your case it’d be different. That makes your smart or funny or something.
So here’s the really big question.
Not for you.
For your kids.
What would your school/office/whatever be like if your ma or pa ran it?
A couple of years ago I wrote about the effect of reading for 15 minutes a day. I still believe that reading for 15 minutes a day produces a great return on the investment. Are there other investments we can make?
Study seems like it could be a good thing, but what about return on investment – ROI? This from the TAFE Directors’ Newsletter 21 July 2008:
VET TRAINING GOOD FOR THE HIP POCKETA new study released by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) has found that study in the VET sector provided students of all ages with a sound financial investment.
The report, Private returns to vocational education and training qualifications, showed that the rate of return for study in the VET sector generally exceeds 20 per cent, and in some areas more than 50 per cent.
NCVER Managing Director Dr Tom Karmel said that the research puts to rest doubts that doing a VET course is worthwhile.
“The fact is that study in VET institutions is rewarded financially and students come out ahead”, Dr Karmel said.
The research also shows us that males benefit slightly more than females, on average, and that the returns to part-time VET students tend to be greater than for full-timers.
The full report is available from the Australian National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER). VET is the Australian Vocational Education and Training, TAFE is Technical and Further Education – the polytechnic sector in Australia. In summary, the research found that the best returns were for students who study higher-level qualifications (certificate III upwards), and do so part-time. In other words, go do a trade. I think that’s great advice – here in New Zealand I’d recommend kids leaving school to take to a trade first, get some university training next. Rationale? A school leaver at 18 have be a qualified electrician at 22, earning $60k+, with no student debt. If they want to pursue an academic course of study they can, and complete a degree or two over the next four years – and still have little or no student debt due to careful application of vacation and weekend work.
I believe everyone needs a trade. Why? Look at the word – trade – essentially this is a manual skill you can trade with. It’s the time-tested approach – I’ll paint your walls in exchange for your wiring my house. Somehow a degree in linguistics doesn’t have the same barter power.
Warren Buffett, having grown his personal wealth from zero to $62bn, recently spoke about ‘the most important investment you can make’. As reported over on Moneyweb (hat tip to The Practice of Leadership):
“The most important investment you can make is in yourself. Very few people get anything like their potential horsepower translated into the actual horsepower of their output in life. Potential exceeds realisation for many people.Just imagine you’re 16 and I was going to give you a car of your choice today, any car you wanted to pick. But there was one catch. It was the only car you were able to have for the rest of your life. You had to make it last. So how would you treat it?
Well, of course you’d read the owners’ manual about five times before you turn the key in the ignition. You would keep it garaged; any little rust would get taken care of immediately; you’d change the oil twice as often as you were supposed to – because you would know it had to last a lifetime.”
He adds: “Then I tell the students you get one body and one mind. And it’s going to have to last you a lifetime so you’d better treat it the same way. You’d better start doing it right now because it doesn’t do any good if you start working on it when you are 50 or 60 and the little speck of rust has turned into something big.
The best asset is your own self. You can become, to an enormous degree, the person you want to be.”
Buffett says he often asks university students to imagine they had the chance to own 10% of any of their classmates for the rest of their lives. The most popular choice is not the one with the highest IQ or the best grades but, he says “the person who is the most effective”.
“The reason people are effective is because other people want to work with them, they want to be around them. There are qualities that an individual picks up – being generous; being on time; not claiming more than you deliver; helping other people; all kinds of qualities that turn other people on. And there are things that turn people off. These are habits you pick up.” And working on having the right habits, he says, is a great investment.
According to Dan Roam
Visual thinking is the future of business problem solving. Using our innate ability to see?both with our eyes and our mind?s eye?gives us entirely new ways to discover hidden ideas, develop those ideas intuitively, and then share those ideas with other people in a way they are simply going to ‘get’.
Really? The future? Of course Leonardo would probably think presenting problems and solutions visually was pretty mainstream in a renaissance kind of way. Dan has shared The 10 1/2 Commandments of Visual Thinking: The “Lost Chapter” from The Back of the Napkin with us. For free. Thanks, Dan.
As you build your business, more ideas and better ways to communicate those ideas clearly and quickly are essential. Jim, one of my favorite visual thinkers, helps explain some of the creative processes in the following videos. Thanks, Jim. As you look through the videos, think about how some of the ideas can be applied in your presentations.
In February 2005, management uber-guru Tom Peters wrote “50 short, wonderfully sweet nuggets of advice…” – Part I of 100 Ways to Help You Succeed/Make Money. We sat around holding our breath waiting for Tom to … well, whatever. Waiting. Waiting. WAITING. C’mon Tom, do it or get off the pot. And then, in February 2008, Tom dropped Part II. Eh? 2008? Just 16-17 ways of making money per year? PER YEAR?! Well, was it worth the wait? You be the judge. Management is always something vaguely questionable to an entrepreneur, but if you get a single good idea then the documents are worth every penny. And they’re available for a free download, courtesy of the nice people over at Change This, so the idea doesn’t even have to be all that special… and, if you were to implement one micro-idea every three days for a year you’d be 100+ ideas up on your competitors by the end of the year. Where would you rather be?
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Mark Twain said:
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Ultimately the game is all about you. Launching your business, running your business is a scary and yet incredibly rewarding thing to do. But you will be rewarded, often in ways unexpected, and who knows, you might even make some money along the way. Sometimes things work out fantastically well, sometimes it’s just a disaster. But that’s all part of the challenge. Stick to your game plan, don’t fret about the size of your business – a small garden, well tilled, is something to be proud of. You’re writing the story of your life – you might as well come back with great stories of the day you caught the perfect wave. Or would you rather tell about how you managed to unjam the photocopier, or how you opened a new packet of paper clips and chained them all together…
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