You've always known just how smart she is. From her early aptitude for science to her first big discovery. And now that graduation is right around the corner, she can continue to excel. America's Navy offers her the chance to get hands-on training and experience for the career she was born for.

From fluid design to cyber intelligence and comms networks or civil engineering, it's the smart way to get ahead. Learn more at Navy.com, America's Navy, forged by the sea. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Josh Rasheeds. I'm your host. Today we continue our financial goals that everybody should set series with goal five, which is simply this, set a goal to get as much of the highest quality education that you possibly can as soon as you can. Set a goal to get as much of the highest quality education that you possibly can as soon as you can.

I'm going to expand this concept very carefully in today's podcast, explain to you why it is so foundational. But a quick review of this series so far, goal one, I encourage you to get a job because once you have a job, you have income. And as soon as you have income, you start to be able to make important decisions.

Number two, I encourage you to spend half your income and save half your income. The goal being to accumulate investment capital, extra money that you can use for even things like we're going to talk about today. Goal three, I encourage you to give away 10% of your income, to do it systematically in order to strengthen your giving muscles, to increase your own happiness and self-confidence in life by recognizing that indeed you are quite well off, and to prepare you to make a difference in the world by helping you to hone in on the things that are most important to you where you want to make the biggest difference.

Then goal four was I encourage you to begin a job or a career that has the long-term potential to get you to be a top 20% income earner. Encourage you not just to take some random job, at the beginning, first one was, okay, take a random job, that's fine.

But then I want you to think about where your job might lead. If you don't see the potential for your current job or your current career track to take you to be a top 20% income earner, then I want you to reconsider that career track and try to find a job or a career track where that is a reasonable possibility in the fullness of time.

Now today, goal five, get as much of the highest quality education that you possibly can as soon as you can is probably going to be your pathway to accomplishing goal four. Even if it's not directly related, this goal still needs to stand strong. There are a couple of reasons that education is the foundational thing that we look at in order to think about long-term financial impact.

The first reason is that education allows you to move into fields that have a much bigger long-term opportunity than those without. Think back to earlier in the series where I talked about the basic value of human labor and I talked about how when you're beginning, if you're not highly educated, you don't have any particular skills, basically what you're selling is your physical ability.

I use the example of digging a ditch. All around the world, we don't see this much in the United States anymore, but all around the world, I run into people who are quite literally just selling their physical daily labor. You'll run across an old man or an old woman that's passing down the street with a broom in his hand, picking up garbage, sweeping the streets, things like that.

These are the most poorly paid jobs in the world and without education, there's not really much of an ability to advance from them. These jobs are useful. They should be treated with honor. We should honor those who do them because they're doing something that we need done and that may be the limit of this person's capability or the limit of this person's ambition.

We want to honor the work itself. There's nothing dishonorable about it because it's honest labor that contributes to the good of society, but it's very hard to build a long-term financial plan on that. Again, there's no shame in these. Most of us start with this. I remember one of the earliest jobs that I had that was similar to this was when I was in middle school.

I worked for a friend of mine who was a tile contractor and I worked as a helper on a tile job. And this job is working as a helper laying tile is basically the same thing as is just simply selling your basic labor. You don't start with anything skilled.

You're not actually laying tile. All you're doing is using your physical strength. And so I remember day one of that job, I was put to work with a chipping hammer, chipping up a floor, lobby of a big condo building that we were retiling. And so basically all you need to do is hold the chipping hammer and use it to chip up the floor, swing the sledgehammer to chip up the floor and it's basic labor.

Then from there, you move on to something where you get a little – well, the next one is usually you do carrying jobs. So I carried many boxes of tile from by the street where the truck dropped them off to the job site and positioned them in the bathroom.

Carried many buckets of thinset and mud depending on whether we're laying tile or marble. Carried many buckets of those kinds of things, just basic raw labor. And it's again work, it's useful. I'm glad I had the job. I learned a lot from it. But there's no opportunity for it until you start being educated.

So education begins with something like here's how you mix up a bucket of thinset. And if you're a helper, then somebody gives you a lesson. Here's the basic dry ingredients. Here's how much water you have. Here's the mixer. Mix it up and carry buckets of thinset or buckets of mud to the tile setter who's actually laying the tile.

So now you start to have a little bit of skill. And skill grows over time and by the end of the summer, I was grouting floors. I was doing some polishing work and refinishing work, various things where you start to build a little bit of skill. But in order to build skill, you have to get educated.

You have to be taught how to do that. Now my advancement over the course of that summer job was very slow and all of the education was informal. It was all based upon the instructions, just the daily instructions from the tile mechanic whose helper I was. And you could advance in that regularly little by little.

But now I want you to imagine that I actually engaged in some process of education. I myself was not smart enough to do this at the time. But imagine that I had gone to the library and checked out a couple of books on laying tile. Imagine that in today's world, I had gone to YouTube and I had found some various tutorials on YouTube and I had started to take some lessons and some classes on different aspects of tile setting.

And then imagine at some point my boss gave me a chance to do something that was a little bit complicated and I did it well because of the education that I had taken, the knowledge that I had learned. And as soon as I had an opportunity to practice those skills, I practiced those skills, then now I could make much faster progress in my career.

So this is a very simple example of the importance of education. If you will go and become educated in the thing that you're doing and you'll get as much of the highest quality education that you possibly can as soon as you can, you will get much faster financial results.

Imagine if I weren't simply a middle schooler with a random summer job, but instead I were say a young guy who had just graduated from high school. And I had actually gone and instead of just signing up as a helper, I had gone and taken some classes from some kind of tile setting institute or coursework.

And I had practiced and I was trained in some way in order to be an effective tile setter. Well now I would have gone into the career world and I would have been able to be hired as some form of actual tile mechanic rather than just a random helper who had to work his way up slowly.

And that jump in pay from being educated as a craftsman would have made a big difference to my financial results as say a 20-year-old, assuming I started at 18, instead of just simply starting as a helper and working my way up. I would be years ahead of the 18-year-old who just started off as a basic helper if I had actually gone through some courses.

Incidentally, I think in the United States, this is something that we don't generally do well in training people systematically with coursework for the skilled trades. I'm a great admirer of the European system in Switzerland and Germany and other nations where being a craftsman or a builder is actually a skilled trade.

And there are many high quality schools that go through and systematically teach the skills to young apprentices so that they can enter into their field at an earlier age with actual skills that have been proven in a classroom environment. We'd like to see more of that happen in the United States because the informal method of instruction where you're just relying on your boss to teach you something and show you something suffers from a whole host of problems in terms of an actual method.

It can work. It certainly has worked throughout history, but in order for it to work well, you need a very educationally focused master, meaning a leader, the mechanic, the person that you're working under, and that person needs to have the skills and the ability to actually train you. And there aren't many, I didn't ever experience that there were all that many people who are very good at training.

There were some and when you find those people as a young guy and somebody who's actually willing to take the time and explain to you what's happening, it's incredibly rewarding. But having to pick everything up the hard way doesn't really, really work. So I use this as a practical example just to say that if you get as much of the highest quality education that you possibly can as soon as you can, you will be able to make faster progress in a career.

You can get hired at a higher initial rate. Because of your higher levels of education, you'll probably make faster progress and be more productive than many other people, which allows your financial income to grow faster. And all of this, especially if you're saving half your income, all of this will compound more and more with the fullness of time.

Getting more education also puts you into a different direction in terms of potential careers. The person who has the most education is usually going to be being steered relatively automatically towards the highest income careers because of the cost of getting that education. As we think about various professions and you go down just industry level professions and you rank them based upon their current earnings, the standard earnings for that profession, they rank pretty neatly in terms of the actual amount of education needed as compared to the average income of the participants in that career field.

The more education required or the more schooling required in order to function in this career, the higher the long-term earning potential. And if you look at the total lifetime earnings of various careers, you can see that the payoff of investing in education is extremely high. Education puts you on the fast track in everything.

And the most highly educated person in a job or in a career or in a career area is going to have the basic tools and equipment to go the fastest towards the long-term goal, towards long-term success. Now you notice about 40 seconds ago I stuck in a word that I hadn't used until the about 11 minute mark of this podcast.

I inserted the word schooling alongside the word education. I want you to note that the word education has a different connotation for you than the word schooling. You should not necessarily conflate education with schooling. School is normally an extremely valuable source of education, but it is certainly not the only source of education, and it is not the only source of education that matters.

So these words are not synonymous. When I refer to education, I am referring to learning, to your gaining knowledge, to your building skills, to your enhancing your abilities through active, focused learning. Generally speaking, I like the idea that education is something that you must get for yourself. It's something that you must do for yourself, that education basically should be thought of always as self-education.

The only real education is self-education. That's not necessarily the same thing for school. You can go through school and you can be poorly educated because you chose not to learn anything. Alternatively, you can go through school and you can become highly educated because you were determined to educate yourself through school.

Schooling can be forced, education can't be forced. So in the context of this podcast, I'm referring to education from any source, but that doesn't indicate that you should be opposed to schooling. On the contrary, the standard option that you should choose is as much schooling as quickly as you can of the highest qualities.

Let me restate the basic thesis of this show and let's see if this holds true. Your goal should be to get as much of the highest quality schooling as you possibly can as soon as you can. Is that true? I don't think it's as true as it is when I stated it in the term of education, but I think it is generally true because schooling is mostly the most direct pathway to education.

It allows you to learn very efficiently because for most fields, most jobs, the person who teaches you your school classes is a person who has been carefully focused on how to teach those the most effectively. The difficulty here comes from the fact that the one type of schooling that we all have some experience in to some degree or some knowledge of is usually government K-12 compulsory schooling.

That statement that I said probably doesn't hold true for all of our schooling experiences. Most of us have had some really great teachers who put enormous amounts of thought into helping their students to learn as much as possible, inspired learning. Most of us have also had some pretty subpar teachers who really didn't accomplish those goals and that's probably inevitable in that kind of schooling.

Once you get out of K-12 though, depending on the school that you go to, things can change very differently. I remember one school experience that I had was when I went through my insurance school, when I first got a life health and annuity insurance license in the state of Florida.

It's a 40-hour school requirement in order to get your basic license and the teacher who taught that class was a wizard at teaching. He was so good. He had taught the class for years. He had had a long career as a life insurance agent. He'd retired from that and he'd taught this class for years.

His entire 40-hour class was perfectly scripted to hit every time mark. He had carefully crafted his message to teach important lessons from the industry, to teach important tools and sets of knowledge as well as to pass the exam. And when I finished his school, his 40 hours worth of class, his 40-hour school, I felt like it was one of the most productive experiences of my life.

I came away from that school basically saying, "Every adult should take a 40-hour life health and annuity class. This is amazing levels of education. This is wonderful." And it was vastly more efficient for me to go through his class than for me to go out and try to put together a big stack of books.

I've routinely found this to be a differentiator. If you talk to just simply an average life insurance agent versus an average personal finance enthusiast, I think that the average life insurance agent, by virtue of having gone through the basics of an insurance school, has a better broad-based understanding of the world of financial products and rules and laws and things like that than does the average personal finance enthusiast.

That's not to say that the finance enthusiast may not also have areas of strong specialization. But usually what happens when you're purely self-educated is that you tend to gravitate, you tend to orient your education towards the things that interest you the most, and you tend to neglect the things that don't interest you, which means that you often have holes in your knowledge base that you wouldn't have if you went through some form of mandatory course of instruction.

And having exposure to that allows you to ask better questions. And so the ideal thing is to bring these two things together, is to have the exposure to what is taught in a school of some kind, where you're basically forced to learn everything, and then supplement that with your own real focus on the things that interest you the most.

Similarly, and just you staying in the life insurance space, I went through various schools for preparing for a certified financial planner exam. I went through schools for preparing to take all the various securities exams for securities licenses. And time and again, I found those schools to be enormously productive experiences, to be extremely valuable.

And every time I went through one, I came away really impressed with the experience. Every industry and every career has some version of these schools. And because when you sit down to teach a class, you generally automatically make a comprehensive – the person who does it usually knows the field very well and sits down to try to say, "I need to make this class serve everybody with all of the mandatory minimum levels of knowledge that this person needs." And the experience you have going through schools is very productive.

Even though in today's world, we love to dump on the value of a college education, I think this basic principle still holds. I think it still holds even for a standard high school model. As my children are headed towards high school, I've been spending a lot of time looking at my state's various requirements of what they need to know, what they need to study.

And at its core, when you look at it, you say, "This is a pretty good base level of knowledge that most people would be well-served if they knew this." Same thing with college. If you have a college degree in a certain subject, the degree-granting institution is going to make sure that you have gone through and learned all the different fields that are necessary.

And that is one of the reasons why this traditional school model that we all live in still has significant levels of value. And so I think it is fair to say that you should get as much of the highest quality schooling as you possibly can as soon as you can.

I don't bristle against that statement. Very specifically, let's note this back to the normal trend of decisions that especially young people make. Should you finish high school? My answer is yes. You need a credential of some kind to indicate finishing. High school is one of those funny things where we know that it's significantly important, but it's hard to defend all of the applications of its importance.

When you go on from high school, the high school credential basically becomes irrelevant. I don't think I have ever shown anybody my high school diploma. I obviously must have submitted it to the college that I attended initially, but since then I've never seen or gotten a high school transcript or showed my high school diploma to anybody.

And I think that there are many people who don't have any form of high school diploma that can generally go through life pretty well. But what happens is if you don't have some form of completion certificate for high school, you reach a certain point where you want to take a certain job and they say, "High school diploma required," and all of a sudden you can't do it.

And yet, if you just focus on it, it's not that hard to finish it when you are younger. You've always known just how smart she is, from her early aptitude for science to her first big discovery. And now that graduation is right around the corner, she can continue to excel.

America's Navy offers her the chance to get hands-on training and experience for the career she was born for. From chemistry to computer science, aviation mechanics, or ship propulsion, it's the smart way to get ahead. Learn more at Navy.com. America's Navy, forged by the sea. I can't think, other than significant disability of some kind, in which case you could still get a diploma of some kind, I can't think of a scenario in which I don't think a teenager should finish a course of study for high school.

The course of study doesn't have to be huge and comprehensive, it doesn't have to be nothing but AP classes. It may be as simple as completing a GED. For the non-Americans, that's basically a, I think it's grade equivalent diploma, I don't remember what it stands for, but it's basically a quiz or a test for certifying that you have learned what is expected for an average high school student.

So completing some kind of test can be fine. And so if I'm working with a student, and let's say that I'm coaching a 14-year-old who says, "I think high school is going to be an enormous waste of time," well, my answer is, "Okay, let's do your GED, pass your GED, and be done with it." But you need to have something that indicates your academic ability, unless you have some significant level of disability that needs to be dealt with.

So you should finish high school, and we know that, in general, the average person is going to earn significantly more with a high school degree than without a high school degree. We're always tempted, and I especially have this temptation, we're always tempted to go to the extreme example, the brilliantly smart person who became a multi-gazillionaire without ever finishing high school, and say, "Well, this proves the rule." But in fact, it doesn't.

I'm sorry, "This proves that the advice of finishing high school is not good." But in fact, it doesn't prove it in any way. It's the exact opposite. In order to succeed without a high school degree, you've got to be super, super brilliant and super, super competitive and have all kinds of other benefits, whereas if you just finish high school, you can be perfectly normal and average and do well in life.

So you should finish a high school degree. Should you go to college? My answer is, for most people, most probably. If you're asking the question, then you probably should go. And I think that you're generally not going to regret having a college degree in the fullness of time. Even though I have regrets about how I went about it, I do not regret not—excuse me, I'm all twisted up—I don't regret going to college.

There are other pathways other than college. But if you're the kind of person who's asking the question of, "Should I go to college?" the answer is probably yes, you should. Now that we've arrived at basically undergraduate degree, let's talk for a minute about why I think this is pretty obviously sound advice.

There are options available that will fit almost any kind of person, with almost any kind of interest, of almost any kind of budget. If the only option was, "Should I go to college at this very difficult school to get into that's going to charge me $50,000 a year?" I couldn't be so casual in saying that everybody should go to college.

But since there are many options, including very low-cost options, including much less difficult options, including degrees that emphasize all kinds of different skills, some of them emphasizing liberal arts skills, some of them emphasizing practical skills, with all kinds of degrees, there is something that you can find that will fit your basic skill and basic inclination.

And once again, if you have a college degree, you will find that life is a lot easier for you. You'll find access to more jobs, more careers than you otherwise would find, and there are plenty of more options available to you, which in the fullness of time will lead to your earning more money and make it more straightforward for you to get that top 20% income, job or business or career that you want to look for.

If I'm coaching somebody who has a college degree, I can with confidence put them on track to that top 20% job, top 20% of income level job. If I'm coaching somebody who doesn't have a college degree, I don't have the same level of confidence. I believe it's still possible, but I don't have the same level of confidence.

So this holds true. You should get as much of the highest quality education that you possibly can. Now let's take that apart here for a moment and talk about highest quality. Highest quality is a subjective term, but a meaningful one. There are many careers that don't need any kind of four-year bachelor's degree.

For example, let's say that you wanted to go and work as a paramedic. Well, you don't necessarily need a four-year bachelor's degree to do that, but you do need EMT school and you do need paramedic school. And so you should go and get as much of the highest quality paramedic schooling and training as you possibly can.

Highest quality matters in almost any field. The highest quality education is usually going to be some of the more expensive options. The free market tends to shake out demand based upon pricing. So if you go out and you're looking at different schools, let's say you want to become a pilot and you've never flown anything, if you go out and you're looking at the cost for different flight schools, the highest quality flight schools are probably going to be those that are in the top quartile of cost.

Maybe not the most expensive, and maybe there's one out of let's say the top 10 best flight schools that really is not all that great and they're just trying to puff up their cost as compared to the value. But in general, what things cost pretty much relates to the basic value of them.

Those of us who sell services or products, we try to make a reasonable and informed decision of the costs to charge for things based upon their value. Not always, but most of the time. And there are usually a whole host of benefits associated with the higher cost options that might not be visible to you till the backside.

So for example, people who go to a prestigious school in a particular field probably have an easier time getting hired and getting a job afterwards. It's not that the other guy can't get hired, that he can't get a job, it's just that he probably has a harder time if he doesn't go to a prestigious school.

All of the other benefits, the kinds of people that you're involved with, these basically align with overall cost. So in general, you should get the highest quality schooling and education that you can afford based upon the amount of money that you have saved. And this is why I encourage you to restrict your spending to, say, 50% of your income, to free up money for yourself so that you can get onto the fast track.

You should focus on getting the schooling and it's better to go to a bad school that you can afford than an expensive school that you don't have the money for, sure. But by being conservative with your spending, that should free up the money for you to go to the highest quality institution that you can find that's going to serve the particular career that you are targeting or that you are interested in.

So the general default answer for questions like, "Should I go to college?" or "Should I go to the school or just start in the business?" Generally speaking, the answer from a financial perspective is, yes, you should go. If you're capable of going, if you're capable of getting in, and if you're capable of finishing, you probably should go.

I acknowledge that many people are not capable of going. They're not capable of getting in and not capable of finishing. And so I'm intentionally trying to be very subjective here. Notice I said you should get as much education, get as much of the highest quality education that you possibly can.

The you is important. Your skills and your abilities will be different than mine and different from every other person. But you should get as much of the highest quality education that you possibly can as soon as you can. So you should go to college. You should go to the best college that you have access to and that fits your overall ambitions and long-term plans.

You're not going to be a failure if you don't go to an Ivy League university. But if you do go to an Ivy League university, you probably aren't going to regret the credentials that you are granted at the end of your time there. And so if you want something other than what an Ivy League university can offer you, pursue that.

But the Ivy League university pathway still offers enormous benefits. So if you can work it out, you should go to the best quality school that you can. Now long-time listeners of Radical Personal Finance would probably be expecting me to start inserting more caveats and more disclaimers and more justification and things like that here because that's my general inclination.

My general inclination is to go into things like, well, you should calculate the value of the cost of the degree and how much money you have and all of that stuff. But I've decided not to put that in here and it's for one basic reason. I've realized that it's enormously valuable to simply set the goal and then let people figure out how to do it.

And I didn't say that everybody should go to an Ivy League university as my goal. I did say get as much of the highest quality education that you possibly can as soon as you can. And my reason for doing that is simply that you will establish the actual meaning of that based upon what is accessible to you.

And whatever you consider to be the highest level of education, I'm using Ivy League university as a kind of a stand-in for something that has a lot of cultural panache and cachet. But if you set the goal of going to an Ivy League university, you're probably capable of going there and you're probably also perfectly capable of going there and paying for it, having it paid for without ever borrowing money, without ever doing anything.

And you're probably also perfectly capable of going there and choosing a degree that that Ivy League university is really valuable in rather than a degree that it's not valuable in. And you're probably perfectly capable of going there and maintaining your soul in the process and really being a valuable part of your life.

So sometimes I've realized that I spend so much time caveating everything that it can discourage somebody who's capable of going there. This leads me conveniently enough to the next thing that I want to move to, which is partly by considering higher levels of degrees. So I talked about should you finish high school, go to college, go to a fancy college.

Question now is should you go to things like graduate school? My answer is yes. You should get as much of the highest quality education that you possibly can as soon as you can. And that includes, if you're in the standard academic world, graduate school, master's degrees, PhDs, postdoctoral work.

If that includes some other field that you're in, it means advanced specialty schools, advanced training institutes, whatever is appropriate to your career and interest. You should go as far as you can as fast as you can. Why? Why do I say this with confidence now? The reason is you don't have to do one or the other.

When I think back on all of the arguments that people made to me, I was discouraged by some people. I can't remember who, but generally I was discouraged from going and getting a master's degree, from going and doing PhD work. I heard things from people who said things like, for example, that, "You know what?

If you're going to go to get a master's degree, you should probably have a few years of work experience." Okay, that could be perfectly true. I'm not denying that work experience can be useful, but the goal still should be get as much work experience as is useful and then go and get the graduate degree.

Similarly, I am a proponent of things like gap years for graduating high school students. All of the research that I have seen on the concept of a gap year indicates that a gap year is a really good and healthy thing for young people to have, that for the college-bound, for those who go to college after the gap year, they outperform the non-gap year students on basically every metric.

I don't know how many students go on gap year who choose not to go to college, nor do I particularly worry about it, because if that's what they learned by going to gap year, they probably found that that was a better choice for them. Inserting a little bit of time, a year or so, to think about something else, pursue something else, is probably a healthy thing.

What happens is that when you go as far as you can, as fast as you can, you are probably trading out consumption for achievement. What I've discovered whenever I have made my life easier is that usually I just started to consume rather than to produce more. One of the biggest financial mistakes I made when I was younger, as an example, I was a young financial advisor and everyone says, "You need to hire staff.

You need to hire someone to work with you, work for you so that you do less administrative work so that you can earn a higher hourly rate." I think that is true. And so I did that. I hired staff. Problem is, I didn't go and do more of the high return work.

On the contrary, I just went and spent more time hanging out and doing nothing. And so the staff didn't wind up increasing my productivity, it wound up decreasing it. Did it have to be that way? No, it absolutely did not have to be that way. It was my mistake.

I paid for it dearly and I regret it to this day. But I think it is that way for many people. So let's say that you're young and you're thinking about, "Should I go to graduate school or not?" Well, if you don't go to graduate school, there's a good chance that you're not going to fill in all of that extra time with this rigorous self-education program.

Maybe you will, right? And if you will, then you're satisfying what I've done. Maybe you'll be the guy who does the DIY master's degree in computer science and takes all the MIT courses and publicly blogs your way through them and posts all your projects on the internet. That'd be amazing if you did it and I'd be a big supporter of you.

But there's a good chance you're probably not going to do it. So there's a good chance that going and signing up for the master's degree in computer science is probably the right move. Because what will happen is, instead of you just sitting around and playing video games all day, "Well, now I've signed up and I've got to go ahead and finish this thing." And then you probably might as well go ahead and sign up for the PhD program or the advanced certification program or whatever it is for your industry because you're just going to be trading out consumption time for achievement time.

And if you've maxed out all of those things, and let's say you're 30 years old and you've gotten all that done, I don't think you're ever going to regret that. There are clearly some people, I guess, who do, but in general, going as far as you can, as fast as you can, as early as you can in the fullness of time makes a lot of sense.

Just from my own personal experience, I have something like, I don't know, seven or eight different financial certifications and designations, certified financial planner and charter life underwriter and a bunch of other stuff like that. At the time, I thought I was working really hard to do that stuff. There would be times many mornings I would get up and I was newly married, I would get up and I'd go to leave my wife at home in bed and I'd get up and go to Denny's at four o'clock in the morning and study for a couple of hours in the morning.

That was what I found out worked for me and then go home, have breakfast and then go to work. I thought, "Man, I'm working really hard. Maybe I'm working too hard." Today, I look back on the stuff and I laugh. I laugh at how easy it was. And all I did was just swap out some wasted time for doing more academics.

And I'm glad I did it. I wish I'd done more. I wish I had pushed myself farther. I wish I had done more. Today, I wish very much that I had a PhD. And I could have done it, I just never set the goal, no one ever really encouraged me to do it.

So don't worry, I'm not complaining or whining, I can still go and do it. But it is more difficult to do at certain points in time. And in hindsight, if I had gone ahead and just signed up for it, there would have been a modest cost. I would have had to work at it, but it would put me in a very different place today that I regret.

I was offered a fellowship program. When I first started radical personal finance, actually, I had just finished my master's degree in financial planning at the American College. And one of the professors there, when I was there doing my capstone work, pulled me aside and said, "You should do our fellowship." And because I didn't have this automatic idea that I'm now trying to convey to you of get as much of the highest quality education as you possibly can as soon as you can, I just said, "No, no, I'm going to go work on my business.

After all, I'm starting this new business, I'm going to go work on my business." But this was a false choice. I have the capacity where I could have done both and I don't think I would have been any less effective at either one of them by doing both. Maybe I would have, right?

Who knows? We can't ever know what would have happened. We're not God, we don't have middle knowledge. But I think I could have. And so for basically all people, you should get as much of the highest quality education as you possibly can as soon as you can. You should go as fast as you can.

And if at some point in time you realize, "You know what? I've gone farther than I should," you can stop. If you start a PhD program and you decide, "No, this is really hurting me," you can stop. You can stop for a year or two and then come back or you can just stop.

And you'll know that that was where I should have stopped. Let's say you are a pilot and you get your private pilot's license and you think, "Well, should I really get multi-engine?" The answer is yes, you should. And if you get multi-engine and you get into it and you decide, "I don't want this," then stop.

But in general, you should get multi-engine. And then you say, "Should I go to commercial?" Yes, you should. "Should I get my flight instructor?" Yes, you should. You should go. Because what will happen is as you press down that path as quickly as possible, generally speaking the money that you're spending on the schooling is probably money that you would have just wasted otherwise.

The time that you're spending on the schooling is probably time that you would have just wasted otherwise. And you're probably not going to regret getting as much of that as you can, as much as you have access to. And when you do all that stuff when you're really young and you really go, go, go, go, go, it hugely transforms the rest of your life.

It hugely transforms it. And education has a huge compounding effect over time. It's enormously valuable. Now I began with education. I kind of moved to schooling. Now let me move back from schooling. I repeat, I think these statements are true. Your goal should be to get as much of the highest quality education that you possibly can as soon as you can.

Your goal should also be to get as much of the highest quality schooling as you possibly can as soon as you can. But you should also, even when finished with schooling, you should get as much of the highest quality education that you possibly can as soon as you can.

So you should always look for opportunities to become more well-educated. And this here is where we just simply apply all of the basic fundamentals of self-education, being widely read, being widely lectured to, whether that's through podcasts or videos or online classes that you take, being widely experienced by going to conferences, meeting people.

All of those things pay off. And you should continually do as much of that as you can. And you won't regret it. Follow your interests and go down the pathways. And in time, it'll pay off. I appreciate the many nice compliments that many people pay about the things that I know a little bit about.

I know a little bit about a lot of different topics. And it allows me to do what I do for a living, which I find very gratifying and rewarding. I'm not some kind of genius. I'm not superhuman. Basically all I have done is swapped out some time-wasting consumption activities that other people engage in that I don't engage in.

And I've just substituted my enjoyment for different things. The most mystifying question that anyone has ever, ever asks me is things like, "Joshua, what are your hobbies?" And this was mystifying to me for many years because I always felt like I should have some answer of what to say, like, "Well, I watch football" or something like that.

But later on, I just realized my hobby is learning. That's it. That's my hobby. And I don't see why a hobby of learning is in any way inferior to any other hobby. It's a hobby that has served me well. And I don't find it any less enjoyable than anything else.

I think I get just as much satisfaction out of learning as some other guy does from throwing darts. It's fine. And I'm not good at darts. I can sort of kind of throw a football as long as you don't go too far away, just because I'm a standard American boy.

But in general, you can choose all of these things. And when you choose to have hobbies of things like education or schooling, they are just as enjoyable as anything else. I'm not going to go deep down this rabbit trail. I believe I've done other podcasts on it. But some guys make their hobby drinking beer and eating pizza.

Other guys make their hobby climbing mountains. And both of them get together with their buddies and they do the thing that they like to do. They're both having a great time doing what they're doing. But the guy who chooses the hobby of drinking beer and eating pizza is headed for a lifetime of being fat.

He's headed for early diabetes, early heart attack. He's headed for slothfulness in his life. The guy who makes the habit of climbing mountains is headed for, in general, great health, great stamina, and a totally different perspective of the world. So we need to be really careful about the kinds of things that we generally engage in, that we try to focus on, the kinds of hobbies that we enjoy.

And if you go back and think about the pathway of life of someone who pursues getting as much of the highest quality education as he possibly can, if he spends his 20s, his teens and his 20s, following that path as far as possible, and he wakes up at 30 years old and he finishes out his advanced specialty after medical residency, did he really lose something that was so valuable by doing that?

People are prone to say things like, "Well, he didn't have any fun because he was working all the time or studying all the time." I think that's a false choice. I've known a lot of very high-achieving academics who have a perfectly satisfying social life, have a perfectly normal friend basis.

There's all kinds of ways to do it. There's lots of ways to do it. You don't have to, it's not as, "Oh, well, you're either a medical student or you have a life." What does that even mean? But in general, the person who really dedicates himself to his craft and who works hard and who becomes very highly educated is going to be a more useful and productive member of society.

And that's what we need more of. And hard work is one of those things that when you do it, it's its own reward. It's satisfying in and of itself. When I reflect back to all the times that I didn't work hard and I thought, "Oh, I'm doing too much," I can't today identify any value or any benefit to my life of the times when I didn't work hard.

But I can identify huge value from all the times that I did. Might it be true that overwork is a problem? Might it be true that some people are genuinely working too hard? Might it be true that some people's ambitions are so large that it's putting them into a bad place?

Might it be true that in some cases it's important to lower ambitions? It's important to stretch out timelines? It's important to dial it back 20%? Of course. But that seems like a fairly obviously easily diagnosable problem as compared to the alternative. We can probably err in both directions. We can err on the side of being too hardworking and we can err on the side of being too lazy.

However, one is much more easily diagnosable and recoverable than the other. If you, let's say that you're starting young and you find that you've worked far too hard through your 20s and in your 30s you have a top 20% career, you have a high income, you have a lot of money saved, you're very highly credentialed, you're very highly certified, but you're working too much and too hard, it's relatively easy to go ahead and pull back by 20% or 50%.

Start coasting a little bit. Start smelling the roses a little bit and enjoying life a little bit more and still get amazing results and you'll be happy with that move. It's not so easy to go the other direction. If you spend all your teens and your 20s and your 30s lazing about because you don't want to just do too much and you wind up at, say, 40 years old and you're poorly educated, you are relatively unqualified for almost anything, that's a pain that goes pretty deep and is pretty hard to recover from.

So if we have to err, it's better to err on the side of doing a little bit too much and then pull back when the conditions warrant than the alternative, easier to make corrections in that direction. Now, as I start to wind down this episode, I want to re-emphasize that you should be careful, thoughtful, and strategic about the specific delivery mechanisms of the education that you choose.

If you are working in an area in which self-education through books and seminars and courses is the obviously best path, then focus on that. If you are working in an area where formal education with some kind of accredited school or college is obviously the best path, then focus on that.

Make smart strategic decisions. Every career is different. Every person is at a different place in a career. And throughout your life and lifetime and career, there will be different time periods in which certain choices are pretty obviously better choices than others. What I want you to take home from this episode is simply this.

Your standard choice, your default option, your basic operating mindset should be, "I must get as much education as possible. I must get the highest quality education that is available to me. And I must get it as soon as possible." If you have that basic mindset and you repeatedly exercise the specific steps that will emerge from that mindset, then in the beginning, your career will seem like it's only going a little bit faster than others.

But when we zoom back and look at your life over the course of, say, a 40 or 50-year lifespan, working career, as you repeatedly dogmatically apply that throughout your life, you will be on a very different trajectory and you'll be very happy with your results. While you may strategically use periods of inactivity, such as a gap year or such as, "I'm going to go and work in this industry for two years and then go back and get a graduate degree," that can be a very valuable component of your strategy.

So while you may employ those strategies, you should not allow that to cause you to become complacent, nor should you defer educational and school opportunities to the future thinking, "Oh, I can always go back. I can always do this in the future." You can't always go back, and even if you can do it in the future, there are times in life in which it's more difficult.

Now one final point as to why this is actually very helpful. Think back to goal number two, where I talked about spend half and save half. And think back to how I said that if you'll defer your high-consumption lifestyle by a few years, then you will find yourself to be decades ahead of your peers.

The time in your life in which it will probably be the easiest for you to live very modestly will be during your young adult years, especially your college years. Very rarely do we expect a young person who is in college to have a lot of money. And so everything about the college lifestyle is oriented towards high-return, high-fun activities that are cheap.

You go to an event and you get fed. And if you're hanging out with college students, generally since most people are broke, it's pretty easy to have a lot of fun together, but to have a lot of fun together inexpensively. Where that starts to change is when people start to get out of college and get "real jobs" of adult wages.

And now all of a sudden when they have adult wages and they have low expenses because they're still usually young and single, then they very quickly adapt to a higher consumption lifestyle. There's a really nice natural compliment here that if you stay in school for a little longer than most other people, you have kind of an easy excuse for your frugality.

And remember that just because you're in school doesn't mean you necessarily have to defer earnings for many careers. For some it does. So you can exercise this strategy. So this is something you can exercise at any point in your life. But I'm certainly acknowledging that a lot of this advice in this series is going to be most applicable to young people who are especially thinking about this college strategy.

So if you're spending your 20s and you're finishing out various graduate degrees and terminal degrees in addition to your self-education, and especially if you're working concurrently with that, then from a lifestyle perspective, it's fairly low pressure for you just to acknowledge, "Hey, I don't have much money to spend so I don't spend much money." And in reality, you may be earning very well and you may be saving huge amounts of money.

So this can be a very reasonable way for you to adapt to a low cost of living lifestyle at a time where that really doesn't hurt you very much because your friends are accustomed to it and it's very easy to live inexpensively at this period of life. We'll cover other savings and investments in future episodes.

But your overall long-term rate of return on investments in education tends to be the highest of anything else. If we wanted to put it even more simply than I did in the title of the show, you should spend as much money on your education as you possibly can until you just can't spend money on it anymore.

And when you reach the point where it's just not possible for you to effectively spend money on education, then that's when you flip to other kinds of investments. Your most powerful wealth-building tool is going to be you and your income. And every dollar that you can spend on increasing your income is going to pay off over the long-term course of your career.

This is a really smart move. Goal number five, get as much of the highest quality education that you possibly can as soon as you can. That's a goal that every one of us should set. Be we young, be we old. Be we at the beginning of a career, be we in the middle of a career, even be we in the end of our career.

Every one of us should have a goal of getting as much of the highest quality education as we possibly can as soon as we can. Good results come from that. Are you having problems with your 2018 to 2024 car? If it's constantly in the shop, it may be a lemon.

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