5 Things you have to unlearn to succeed at work

5 Things you have to unlearn to succeed at work A big theme in my life has been how much I had to unlearn to come to the decision to homeschool my kids. I had to unlearn all my assumptions about parenting (it turns out that  kids dont need teachers, they need love). I unlearned  my assumptions about self-management (well-roundedness is a false goal). And I had to change my assumptions about how much respect each child deserves (freedom to choose what we learn is a fundamental right). Now that Ive been homeschooling for a while, I understand that the reason its traumatic for most young adults to enter the workforce  is because they have  to unlearn so many things from school in order to survive in adult life. No matter what age you are, the faster you start your unlearning the faster you can shed the weights that hold you back from moving forward in todays knowledge-based workforce. Here are five things most people need to unlearn. 1.  Accommodating forced learning Gen Y’s latest thing is binge learning, where you become so interested in what youre doing that you dont want to stop until youve learned it all.   But the only way that you can binge learn is to know how to find course materials on your own and choose the sequence of those materials that works best for you.   This means you cant rely on someone elses syllabus and you cant rely on somebody laying out the steps for you. In the workplace, to create our own value, we must create our own learning path.   You have to unlearn the habit of waiting to be told what comes next in your education if you want to take control of your adult life. 2.  Studying for the grade you can get on the test Adult life doesnt give letter grades.   Sometimes adult life gives promotions or if youre good at sales you might win a trip to Hawaii for your family, but in general, the reward of adult life is being able to find a path thats good for you and put yourself on it.   Theres no letter grade for that because the only person who can judge whether its a good path or not is you. The act of making decisions independent of letter grades is completely opposite to everything that school stands for, because if youre doing work that is separate from earning an A, then youre completely uncontrollable in the classroom as you start losing the need to even show up to the classroom. So school teaches you that you should study whats on the test.   Work is the opposite.   What matters will never be on the test. 3. Saving self-discovery for vacation For those of you who dont follow the lives of Prince William and Prince Harry, a gap year is when somebody finishes high school and takes a year off before university study, presumably because you don’t learn about yourself while you are studying, so taking time to learn about yourself is important enough to give it a whole year. This is actually true that usually you dont learn about yourself when youre studying, because if people tell you what to study, then you gain no insight into who you are.   But if you take a year off to learn about yourself, you reinforce the idea that education and self-knowledge are two completely different things. However, in the workforce, education and self-knowledge through work are the twin tickets to adult happiness.   If youre not synchronized so that you have them moving together, you will always feel like youre missing something. 4.  Saying something even when theres nothing to say In sixth grade my teacher gave us a list of topics about Mesopotamia for a ten-page paper she assigned.   When she got to the topic of medicine in Mesopotamia, she said it was a hard one. I picked that one. I brought it home to my dad who can win Trivial Pursuit in one turn every time and my mom who was on Jeopardy, and they said, Medicine in Mesopotamia?  There wasnt any. What are you going to write about this?   We did a bunch of research to determine that, indeed, there were not ten typed pages to be written about medicine in Mesopotamia.   We did conjecture instead, but that only got us to five.   So I learned the art of bullshit by writing ten pages about medicine in Mesopotamia. Paul Graham, one of the premier investors of college-age startup founders, talks about how forced yammering on topics about which you have nothing to say end up affecting you negatively in the workforce. He talks about kids who have great ideas for startups and they think its time to raise money, so they force themselves to start talking about why its time to raise money when, in fact, its not time to raise money.   They have nothing to say about raising money.   They should just be at home doing their business idea. Graham points out that the idea that it doesnt matter whether something is relevant or pertinent or necessary is lost on kids who have been forced to talk about nothing for eighteen years. 5.  Using video games as a reward for finishing learning Its fashionable right now for parents to use video games as a reward for having finished schoolwork or, for the really nice parents, as a reward for just having made it through the school day.   But in my house, video games are the content of learning rather than the reward after learning because  kids who play video games do better as adults. And  video games actually teach important skills for work. Im really happy to tell you that human resource managers understand this so well that its been shown that people who play World of Warcraft at work during work hours on the work computer are higher performing employees.  There are lots of reasons for this.   World of Warcraft is extremely competitive.   It requires long-term commitment and strategy, and it favors people who understand how to shift between different sorts of tasks that require different kinds of thinking. Parents need to unlearn schooling in order to parent so that their kids dont need to unlearn schooling in order to work.