11/05/2025
Learning is the best approach
__"The secret of making progress is to get started..."*
One of my favourite books is called "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself." Published in 1789, it is the autobiography of a boy captured in Africa (in an Igbo village) at age 11, sold as a slave, and shipped to the West Indies. He then became a slave of a sea captain in Virginia in the USA [who gave him the name Gustavus Vassa].
Along the way, Mr Equiano was enslaved by two other people before he actually managed to buy himself out of slavery in 1766 [at about 21 years of age] and move to England. Amongst the many remarkable achievements of this man is the fact that he became famous for bravely campaigning against slavery, and even became a successful entrepreneur!
I have always found his story so inspiring for any number of reasons, but what I wanted to draw attention to today is the fact that Mr Equiano had surmounted nearly unimaginable barriers in his life, not least that he taught himself to read and write as a young adult, then became an author celebrated for his literary skills which he used to advocate passionately for the end of slavery.
My research shows that he was 44 years old when he wrote this autobiography.
Now here is the point I wanted you to see: Being educated has nothing to do with going to school... and certainly has nothing to do with when you left school!
__You can decide at almost any point in your life, if you are healthy, to learn about anything, and at your own pace.
Some of the most extraordinary people in history did not go to great schools, and many didn’t actually go to anything we would recognise as a school today.
If you feel that your education is inadequate for what you want to achieve, why not try to address it. This is called Lifelong Learning.
I remember walking along the street in London one day when I recognised a man walking in front of me with a load of books. He was an executive from a company I dealt with in South Africa. As we stood talking, he explained his approach to me:
“You know, I came from a poor family and didn’t get much of a formal education. So every year, I take time out to go to school. I’m now doing a Master's. It has taken me ten years, but now I want to do a PhD.”
You don’t have to go to London or anywhere else these days, because you can enrol in online courses and work from the comfort of your home.
I did not learn accounting in school, and I always felt a little uncomfortable when accountants were presenting stuff to me, so I enrolled for an accounting and finance course when I was in my thirties. I took to it like a duck to water!
What is it that you wish you knew better?
Don’t disadvantage yourself by making excuses about something that is in your control to fix.
Image credit: KWB-Ubuntu Hope via AI. Subtitle quote by Mark Twain.
