If You Want to be Rich and Happy, Don’t Go to School Summary - Chapter 15

Chapter 15: When 1 + 1 Doesn’t Always Make 2

1.      What is 1 + 1? Often, people believe that only a single answer would suffice – 2, and only 2. This is because we have been taught to think that there’s a single set of right answers which, if we work hard and get good grades, will be our prize upon graduation day. However, if we assume that to be true, it will:

a.       Greatly limit our thinking

b.      Making us difficult to accept new ideas or tolerate the differences

c.       Force us to filter out or distort information that doesn’t exactly fit what we’ve been taught.

d.      Discourage independent thinking and seriously underplays creativity in our lives.

2.      The educational system, with its obsession for right answers teaches rigidity. Those who “get it right”, who do the memorizing correctly, are rewarded with good grades and praise. If we question the system, however, or think for ourselves, we are often chastised or punished with poor grades (and therefore may suffer from low self-esteem).

3.      If we believe that every question has only one right answer – and judge ourselves and others according to our knowledge and acceptance of that answer; anyone who doesn’t know or accept the single answer is deemed an idiot.

4.      Many governments, businesses and families are headed by people who continue to cling to rigid one-right-answer thinking – people who believe that their own point of view is the only point of view that’s possible. Our business history is filled with rigid-minded individuals who clung to one-right-answer thinking and went bankrupt or limited their company’s growth because they were unable to look at alternatives.

5.      It is important to realize that 1 + 1 = 2 belongs to one paradigm; but it is not the only paradigm. If we are to learn how to manage change, if we are to learn how to improve our own lives, we need to know that we do not have to be limited to a single paradigm – no matter how ‘real’ it seems to us or how long we have clung to it as the only reality there is.

6.      For our educational system to adequately serve our society, it needs to break out of the rigid notion that their paradigms – the ones they teach – are the only true or real ones. 

Chapter 16: It Is Not the Teachers