Learn and reach your goals in this fast life
By: Paolo Garito
Tags: Goals In Life, Growth Mindset, Life Hacking, Elon Musk Quotes, Learning

Elon Musk once said: “you don’t need college to learn stuff, colleges are basically for fun, all you need and want to learn is online.”

This strong sentiment expressed by Musk is shared by Peter Thiel, Musk’s co-founder of PayPal that proposed to pay students to leave college to develop their ideas and start a business.

Up to a certain point, I agree with this vision, especially from a financial point of view. In fact, nowadays, most universities are too expensive and require great investments, especially outside the EU. Thus is true that the second-best option, besides some exceptions, is e-learning. You can basically find anything you want online.

However, there are mainly three downsides of having this view and following only the online path:

Missing the expertise and support of professors and SMEs

Losing personal experiences, like exchanges, soft-skills development, etc.

Being overwhelmed by the number of opportunities for online education

The first two points are very subjective and depend on the kind of college/university; instead, the last case could be critical for everyone: what to choose? Youtube? Udemy? LinkedIn? Blog and Forums? Companies’ training programs? Or which of the other opportunities?

There is then the fear of not choosing the right sources and platforms to learn from. At the same time, nowadays, there is a desire to do everything as fast as possible and to have everything as soon as possible.

It is understandably a valuable mindset: we have the technological means to do all that, but in this way, we are losing the “waiting times” so dear to our parents and grandparents. Let us take the example of communicating and maintaining relations with our friends and loved ones. Only thirty years ago, we needed a phone-call or a letter to know how a person was doing while, now, we have tons of alternatives to do that: Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Google Meet, Zoom, all platforms that evolved during the pandemic.

Human development, the biological one, has a very long time. It takes centuries. While technology has shorter development times, sometimes immeasurably quicker, suffice it to say to the last years.

I am an innovation lover, and reasonably, technology represents at least 80% of that world. And, from a certain point of view, it could be possible that technology will subjugate us, all just for some extra comfort. Obviously, it does not mean that technology will replace us, but we could be so influenced by it that we will not notice it.

For this reason, I talked about the waiting moments loved by our parents. We are moving so fast that sometimes we don’t enjoy what we have because of the FOMO, the “Fear Of Missing Out,” the fear of missing something that others have (marketing and trading well-known concept).

Guy Debord once said a beautiful phrase: “sons today look like more to their times rather than to their fathers.” As said before, our fathers lived with a completely different set of technologies. While we (gen X and Z) are continuously adapting to move forward in this world. But here we find the problem: among all the distractions, there are a lot of technologies, a lot of innovators, a lot of resources to learn from…where should we look at?