Let's compound hours

To know is to find out by the exercise of the intellectual faculties the nature, qualities and relations of things. One way to measure knowledge is to use the average number of years of education of people, this data allows us to obtain an important relationship: the more years of education, the higher the income of a person. Thus we can observe that countries with higher education rates tend to have greater wealth. The question naturally arises: How can we get people to increase their knowledge and consequently increase the wealth of society?

We need some structure to fully understand the nature, qualities and relationships of things. We need practice, repetition and responsibility to achieve mastery in some field, whatever it may be. That's why academic courses are usually designed so that our brains, through repetition, fix important concepts and processes.

With new technologies and social networks we face the threat of superficial learning. We trick our brain into thinking we are learning. In practice, we do not retain specific concepts and data because we are not using the processes necessary for our brain to learn. If we read a history passage on a social network, it is likely that after three months we will not remember the specific dates.

Normally, the time we spend on leisure is much more than we need, and some of that time can be spent on training in a structured way. To learn and grow. It is best to have a previously defined structure, a plan that allows us to focus on topics that interest us with clear objectives. In this plan we can include time to practice complicated concepts, time to repeat important data, evaluate our progress; truly learn.

If we dedicate an hour a day to study we can make a big change in our lives. Let's put some numbers to this logic. We have 24 hours a day, 168 hours a week, 720 hours a month. If we study 5 hours a week (1 hour a day Monday through Friday) for 15 years we would total approximately 4,000 hours. About 500 full 8-hour days.

Compare that figure to the time required for a college degree. College credits are a standardized measure of the amount of work required to pass a course. 1 credit is typically 15 hours. And a college degree requires 120 credits. That means that, over 15 years, studying 5 hours a week consistently, we could finish 2 full college degrees. Let's assume we have 50 years available to study after college. According to our calculations we could obtain 7 university degrees in those 50 years.

The opportunity cost of the distractions that accumulate in our lives is INMENSE. We can and should take advantage of the time we have to seek to improve our ability to know. This will allow us to better understand the world and its relationships, and at the same time allow us to have a better professional and personal development in an increasingly competitive world.

It is imperative to use the advantages of the Internet so that it becomes a real tool for development and not for the deterioration of our knowledge. If as a society we manage to incorporate a habit of constant study, of promoting education and of recognizing effort, the capacity to generate wealth, based on the increase of knowledge, will increase considerably. If as a society we place too much value on leisure, social networks and wasting time, we will end up losing the capacity to know realities in depth.