You have to be in control of this –

You have to be in charge of what you pay attention to – because it determines your experience of life and how it turns out.

“If you are not doing the programming, you are being programmed.” – Brandon Carr

What do you say no to? 

What “place” do you not even go to because of what you may see/hear there?

What information do you let in?

A college degree isn’t what it used to be

New Data: Colleges in Trouble

Metatrend #1: Abundance: Food, Energy & Education

PETER H. DIAMANDIS OCT 23

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“Go to college, get a great job” is no longer the valid paradigm. And this is putting higher education in a tailspin.

Here’s the data you should know:

• Americans calling college “very important” crashed from 75% to 35% in 15 years, while “not too important” quintupled to 24%

• Tuition is up 899% since 1983, saddling 42 million borrowers with $1.8 trillion in debt—second only to mortgages

• College graduates now make up one-third of the long-term unemployed, up from one-fifth a decade ago

• Job postings requiring degrees dropped 6% since 2019

You’re paying a quarter million dollars for a private university education that increasingly guarantees nothing. The credential that used to open doors is now locking people out.

So, what do you (or your kids) do about it?

1/ You need to credential yourself differently now. College used to be the way to signal competence. That era is over. Today, credentialing means building a portfolio that demonstrates value: GitHub repositories showing what you’ve shipped, a consulting practice proving you solve real problems, a YouTube channel teaching what you know. The act of getting accepted by MIT still matters. The four years spent there increasingly don’t.

2/ Top ten schools remain exceptions (and still surprisingly credible). If you’re getting into MIT, Harvard, Stanford, or their peers, the brand still carries weight. These institutions run on massive endowments: their investment returns contribute over twice as much to their budgets as all tuition combined. But schools ranked 40 to 400? They’re facing an existential crisis as perceived value craters.

3/ Employers are waking up to degrees being worthless. Companies are hiring without degree requirements at accelerating rates. Why? Because the curriculum moves too slowly. As one MIT administrator admitted: “We can build a nuclear reactor on campus faster than we can change this curriculum.” By the time you graduate, what you learned freshman year is obsolete.

4/ Master one skill: growing revenue, and you’ll always have work. Most companies care about exactly one thing: increasing revenue. If you can demonstrably grow top-line numbers, degrees become irrelevant. Show me you drove $2M in new sales or built a product that acquired 100K users. That’s infinitely more valuable than a transcript.

5/ The best educator in the world will be AI-driven. AI tutors will provide one-on-one adaptive instruction in any subject, any language, at near-zero cost. Programs using AI-assisted learning already show students learning 5-10 times faster than traditional classrooms. The university model of one professor lecturing 300 students is dead… it just doesn’t know it yet.

6/ Trade school is now another option. As Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, recently said: “If you’re an electrician, you’re a plumber, a carpenter—we’re going to need hundreds of thousands of them to build all of these factories.” These professions today command immediate jobs and salaries between $100,000 and $150,000 per year without the extraordinary debt of college.

Here’s the opportunity: The credential economy is being rebuilt from scratch. The old gatekeepers are losing their monopoly. This creates a massive opening for those who demonstrate value directly through their work product, build networks through entrepreneurship, and learn faster using AI than any traditional program could teach.

The future belongs to the self-credentialed.

Until next time,

Peter

Discounting the good

A lot of times we are winning and we forget we are winning.

Things could be amazing and nobody is happy.

Most things are great, including the big stuff, and all we can think about is how our coffee wasn’t right or that there was 5 minutes of traffic or some other trifle. 

We discount the good and focus on the bad.

What if we flipped that around? 

Let go of (the old) you

“To become who you want to be, you must sacrifice who you are.” – Miyamoto Musachi

There are lots of ways to express the same idea.  

Sometimes you hear it one way, and it doesn’t sink in.  Then you hear it another way, and it does.

In fact, if one was to analyze thousands of Think Daily messages over the years, I know that they can be clumped together in groups that have the same core idea.

The good news is there aren’t 1,000 ideas to heed to be your best self.

But we do need repetition, reminders, and reinforcement of the handful of themes that will.  

The quote above was recently written in the comments by Aaron Stull from Pittsburgh. 

It’s another way of saying “You can’t be the old you and the new you at the same time” or “The old you must die so the new you may be born.”

What parts of you do you need to let go?

Postpone death

We’re all going to die.  That is for sure.

The idea is to postpone the inevitable event as long as possible.

While there are no guarantees, what would you do to stack the odds in your favor?

Self-Control – yea – again.

“As far as your self-control goes, as far goes your freedom.” – Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Can you control yourself?

When the impulses come – to eat, to yell, to fight, to be lazy, to take the easy way out, to cheat – can you control yourself then?

“Discipline comes through self-control.  If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self.” -Napoleon Hill

If your life depended on it, would you do this?

If your life depended on it, would you change your diet?

If your life depended on it would you exercise like your body needs?

Well, it does.

Should you wait to be diagnosed, or do it now?

Most wait.  You?

Never ask an encyclopedia salesman if you need an encyclopedia.

Are there conflicts of interest all over the place that we don’t consider?

Often on the most important issues of our lives we easily take the advice of highly educated, highly paid, highly esteemed professionals.

That’s not always a good idea.

Think. Read. Ask more questions.  Research.  Look at the obvious.  Talk to more people.  Consider alternate opinions.

Then decide.

Most of your thoughts are the same ones you had yesterday.

But are they working?  Are they serving you well?  What are the results of the actions those thoughts lead to?

You made the thoughts.  They determine how your life and the different parts of it turn out.

Whatever thoughts are not getting you great results have to be let go or updated.

If something is not working, you wouldn’t just keep doing that to yourself, would you?

Stillness and quiet

We have a lot of noise going on.  We create a lot of mental chatter.  We take in visual and auditory inputs (the eyes and ears are where most information comes in) for our brains to process, and then we create even more mental chatter about what came in.

We can become addicted to the noise.  We can lose our ability to think (and be) as we were designed.  

We can feel overwhelm and depression.

There are so many folders open on our mental desk…

Stillness and quiet are strong remedies. 

Shut down anymore inputs. 

Go out in nature.

Let your brain process those folders and start putting them away.

In stillness we can think.  

We can understand and decide.

We can feel who we genuinely are.