The Lessons School Forgot

Chapter 5The truth about money

I'm not sure why, but for some reason the topic of money was taboo when I was growing up. To this day many of us find it awkward to talk about how much we earn and to compare notes. Money makes people act a little strangely. Again, this starts early, and while money isn't everything, it is the glue that holds our modern lives together, so it's worth knowing how it works. People who really want to know about money have to seek out that knowledge independently. Disappointingly, it's rarely taught at school. There's some weird kind of pretence that we are actually going to school to learn, not how to earn money, but rather how to get a job. ‘Don't talk about the war', but the day we leave school money becomes the battlefield of life.

The reason this stuff isn't taught in school was spelt out at the start of the book. School wasn't set up to teach you how to be rich; it was set up to teach you how to get a job in existing and emerging industries. It was set up to teach the three R's of reading, writing, and arithmetic. But money is a curious beast, and just being good at arithmetic is no guarantee of being able to manage money. And earning lots of it doesn't mean you'll understand it, or be able to keep it. That's why I'm adding the important ‘R' of Revenue. I call it revenue on purpose, because I want people to think beyond jobs and careers to earn money and to view it objectively in its entirety, including all the possible ways money can be accumulated, ...