Page 45 - Benjamin Franklin\'s The Way to Wealth: A 52 brilliant ideas interpretation - PDFDrive.com

18 INVEST IN YOUR NUMBER ONE ASSET: YOU

A Renaissance man of the first order, Franklin believed you worked you
way to wealth by means of your own skill and nothing else—or as he
put it ‘then help hands, for I have no lands, or if I have, they are
smartly taxed’.

Some of us hated school and spent most of our college years drinking and
chasing the opposite sex (you too, huh?). Only accountants continue to take
exams after that, right? Day courses are for ladies who lunch; evening
courses for people who never learnt to read or write. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

DEFINING IDEA…
Don’t waste time learning the ‘tricks of the trade’. Instead, learn the
trade.
~ TRADITIONAL SAYING

Education doesn’t stop because you got a degree. Or because you didn’t.
We’re all learning as we go, and anyone who wants to make themselves
marketable and successful will look for ways of consolidating that learning
into skills or qualifications that are recognisable and understandable to
others. As Franklin puts it ‘he that hath a trade hath an estate’, meaning
that if you have a skill that others want then you have a solid foundation of
your own on which to build. Which is fine if you’re a plumber or a piano
tuner, but a tad more tricky if you’re a consultant or work in
communications.

Trades just aren’t as clear-cut as they used to be for a number of reasons.
One is that Western societies have moved away from pushing products and
are instead increasingly focused on providing services. Services tend to be a
bit more nebulous and so are the job titles and roles that go with them.
Another is that jobs exist that have simply never existed before. I used to
think I knew what an evangelist was but I had to re-think after meeting a
growing number of Technology Evangelists and even Games Evangelists.
For a while I myself gloried in the job title of The Naked Guy (not half as