The Focus of Your Learning

It is always amazing to see how our education system has continuously fails our society. Aside from having kids being "educated" by people with questionable morals (a.k.a. bureaucratic greedy teachers who want to do less and earn more), I found that there are fundamental flaws in the philosophy of the public education. If we are serious about increasing our financial intelligence, we must not make the same mistake as our bureaucratic education system does. 

The biggest flaw in the system is this: Our schools put most effort and resources on filling our minds with content, but it does a very poor job in expanding our context.

Your mind is like the cup shown above, and your knowledge and experience is the content in your mind. In school, we are constantly being filled with content, but we only get to rarely and slowly expand our context.

Here is an example of what content and context mean. For instance, we all (hopefully) know the math equation 1+1 = 2. 1+1 = 2 is the content. 1+1 = 3 (in math) is also a content too, but this content will never be in our mind because our context does not allow us to accept this content (and for good reasons).

So what? You may ask. What does 1+1=3 has to do with anything? Well, it has to do with EVERYTHING about learning, for the example implies that you will not be able to fill your mind with content (even if the content is excellent) if you do not possess the proper context! Without the proper context, even excellent content would appear like 1+1=3. For instance, a lot of people have big business ideas, but a common statement these people say is that I don't have the money to realize the great idea. If you encourage these people and tell them that they do not need money to make money, these people will often give replies like "that's impossible", or "it's too risky", and simply dismiss their big dream without taking any actions. As you can see, people like this do not have the context to see that it is possible to realize their dream even if they don't have the money. 

On the other hand, for people in 90% Guardian, we understand that $0 to $XXXXXX is only a financial problem. We may not know how to solve it, but we will never say it is not possible and not solvable; we will say we lack the necessary financial intelligence! With the proper context, we know if we want to solve this problem, we just need to increase our financial intelligence, so we will take actions to increase our financial intelligence to realize our great ideas!

Another way of looking at this is what I called the 3-knowledge model. Knowledge in this world can be categorized in 3 ways: Shit you know, shit you know you don't know, and shit you don't know you don't know. The question is, which type of knowledge should be your focus, if you want to gain intelligence?

Consider this example. Say you are a stock trader. You see that company ABC is going to publish its earning report. First, it comes the shit you know. You know that when a company's earning beats expectation, the stock price would soar and you can sell. In addition, based on your research, it looks like company ABC is doing well and it looks like the company's earning would beat expectation. Based on your shit your know, you buy some shares of this company. 

Next, you know that you cannot predict the future, hence you want to have some insurance so just in case things turn the other way, your loss is limited. Now shit you know your don't know hits. You know it is important to "insure" your investment, but you don't know how. Upon some quick research, you learned that you can place a sell stop order to limit your loss. You don't want to lose more than 5%, so you placed a sell stop order at 5% below your purchase price.

To your surprise, the earning report completely disappoints, and as a result there is a massive sell-off which made the price collapsed in a very short time. Now the shit you don't know you don't know hits (hard). You have never imagined that there is a possibility that a stop order would not be exercised at your specified price! However, what happened was that because price dropped so fast, your stop order was gapped/skipped at the specified price, and the shares were never sold at a 5% loss but at a greater loss!

To make you feel even worse, because you were stuck with conventional financial advice and dismiss stock options as "too risky", you never dare to imagine that you could have more securely insured your investment by buying put options!

In the above example, what is the kind of knowledge that could hit you the hardest? Obviously it's the shit you don't know you don't know. Therefore, the path to intelligence is to reduce your "shit you don't know you don't know", and turn as much of them as possible to "shit you know" or "shit you know you don't know". However, schools mainly focus on turning your "shit you know you don't know" into "shit you know", and does very little in reducing your "shit you don't know you don't know".

How can we expand our context? Below are things I personally do (and I am trying my hardest and my best to do them). If you have other ideas, please share!

1. Be a good listener. If you find yourself drafting a reply while listening someone talks, THEN YOU ARE NOT LISTENING. Yes, it's tempting to think of what you should say, and sometimes the talker may be boring and your spirit wants to go to lala land, BUT DON'T! Listening to others exposes you to different contexts and how different contexts see things differently. This is a great way to expand your own context!   (I admit this part I am having serious trouble, and am furiously working on it)
2. Be open-minded. If you hear something that is so unrealistic and so out-of-wreck, DO NOT SIMPLY DISMISS THE INFORMATION. If you think something is unrealistic, it's either that person's statement is actually unrealistic, OR you lack the CONTEXT necessary to appreciate the CONTENT! Listen carefully, try your best to understand, ask questions, and you shall learn. Never be a fool or a cynic. A fool would accept any content, while a cynic would dismiss any content. Be neither and you will thrive!
3. Take actions that scare you. Taking action is the best way to push your context! When you feel your forehead starts sweating, your heart starts rapidly pounding, and your blood starts warming, these are signals that are saying you are at the boundary of your context. Take actions! It may be hard, and we are all guilty of wanting to go back to our comfort zone, but JUST DO IT! No matter you succeed or fail, you will be able to see a different world, as you have just expanded your reality!