The college entrance examination determines which university you can enter, while financial literacy education determines how you will manage your life after graduation.
The college entrance examination is over, but the real life lessons have just begun.
The annual college entrance examination has come to an end.
Recently, good news has been coming from various cities, and more and more outstanding students have received admission notices from Tsinghua University, Peking University, and other key universities.
I sincerely congratulate them.
Twelve years of hard work have finally borne fruit, and the students are about to embark on a new chapter of their lives.
However, whenever I see these news, I can't help but think of another question:
After entering university, what exactly should we be learning?
Before the college entrance examination, we studied hard to enter an ideal university.
But after university, what we start to face is the real life.
Survival, career, wealth, health, interpersonal relationships, time management... These important topics that affect one's entire life have just begun.
In this sense, university is not only the beginning of professional education, but also the starting point for accumulating life assets.
The school teaches us professional knowledge, but rarely teaches us how to manage our lives.
Of course, university should focus on studying our major subjects.
Doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, programmers...
Each profession will help us get a job.
But after graduation, we will soon discover:
What truly affects the quality of life is not just professional ability.
There are also many courses that schools rarely teach systematically:
- How to manage one's income?
- What are assets? What are liabilities?
- Why do people with high income are not necessarily wealthy?
- How to utilize time and compound interest to create long-term value?
- How to keep learning continuously instead of stopping growing right after graduation?
These questions are encountered by almost everyone.
However, many people do not start to seriously think about them until many years after they start working.
"Poor Dad, Rich Dad", which made me start to re-understand wealth
"Poor Dad, Rich Dad".
What truly shocked me was not how many ways of making money were described in the book.
Rather, it was the first time it made me realize:
Wealth is, first and foremost, a state of mind, not a number.
There was a story in the book that left a deep impression on me.
When the author was nine years old, because his wealthy friends didn't want to play with him, he had the first thought:
“ I want to learn how to make money so that I can become rich.”
When I first saw this part, I just thought it was an interesting story.
Later, when I entered society, started working, and began investing, looking back, I realized:
What really matters is not how much money the author earned at the age of nine.
Rather, it is that the author began to think at the age of nine:
How does money work?
This kind of thinking is itself a kind of life asset.
Think about our age of nine again.
What were we doing at the age of nine?
Have you ever thought about making money?
Has anyone ever told us what an asset is?
What is cash flow?
What is compound interest?
What is long-termism?
Most people don't know these concepts.
Even until we graduated from university, we still didn't know these ideas.
We have academic qualifications, but we don't know how to manage wealth.
We have expertise, but we don't know how to plan our lives.
So many people live in a habitual way:
Graduation, work, promotion, marriage, raising a family...
They have been busy all their lives, but rarely stop to think:
Am I accumulating assets or am I constantly consuming my life?
If the university could add one more course, I would like it to be called "Financial Intelligence".
If I were to propose adding a course to the university.
I would not eliminate any of the existing specialized courses.
I merely hope that every young person can acquire one course that is rarely systematically taught in schools:
Financial Intelligence education.
No matter whether you study medicine, law, computer science, finance, art, education, or engineering.
Financial Intelligence is worth being your supplementary major.
Because a major determines how you earn income.
While Financial Intelligence determines:
How you manage income, how you accumulate assets, and how you allow wealth to grow over time.
A truly excellent book will accompany you throughout your life.
Looking back now, my greatest regret is not having made more money earlier.
Rather, it was not having read "Rich Dad Poor Dad" earlier.
If this book had been handed to me during my university years, perhaps I would have taken many fewer detours in life.
So, whenever I see freshmen about to enter university, I always think:
If they could read this book at the new starting point of their lives and truly understand it, it would be a kind of luck.
Of course, understanding a book doesn't mean it's over after just one reading.
The first time I heard about Buffett and Charlie Munger, I didn't truly understand them.
The viewpoints about value investment, long-termism, and compound interest were just words to me at that time.
Only later, after experiencing market fluctuations and gains and losses in investment, and then reading it again, did I realize:
In fact, they had already written the answers there.
It was just that at that time, I didn't have enough life experience to understand it.
The same is true for "Rich Dad Poor Dad".
When you read it when you are young, you see about making money.
When you work, you understand about assets.
When you start investing, you understand about compound interest.
When you experience the ups and downs of life again, you truly understand that wealth is not just the numbers in the account, but also an ability to long-term manage your life.
A truly great book doesn't end its value just because you finish reading the last page.
It will bring new awakenings again and again at different stages of your life as you grow.
True compound interest begins with cognition
Many people think that compound interest is just a concept in investment.
In fact, the greatest compound interest in life is cognition.
A good book may not immediately bring you wealth today.
But it might change every important decision you make in the future.
It will influence your career choice.
Affect your consumption habits.
Influence your investment methods.
Affect your learning ability.
Even affect the way you educate your children.
These invisible changes will form a huge gap in ten or twenty years.
This is the compound interest of cognition.
Final Words
The college entrance examination determines which university you will enter.
But during the four years of college, it will determine whether you start to actively manage your own life.
If a major is the starting point of your future career, then financial intelligence is the starting point of your life assets.
If you could only give a piece of advice to the freshmen about to enter college, I would say:
In addition to studying your major seriously, please also start to learn how to manage your own life as soon as possible.
Read a book that can truly change your perspective.
Develop an ability that can generate long-term returns.
Start to accumulate your own health assets, wealth assets and cognitive assets.
Because the real competition is not just about academic qualifications.
It's also about the competition of perspectives.
And a truly great book will accompany you throughout your life.
Not because it keeps talking.
But because every time you go through a new stage and open it again, it will tell you new answers.
