Brushing Up Against the 80-20 Rule With an Online Education

Have you ever talked to someone that did not have an advanced degree from college or a university, but they seemed like one of the smartest people you had ever met? Sometimes these people that are completely with it are entrepreneurs or they run their own business, while others became book smart from reading, studying on their own, spending time in the library or from surfing the Internet. That's right in this day and age just about anyone can get an online education for free.

Just about any type of question you can type into the search engine you will find the answer too. In fact, and I mentioned this the other day to someone while I was sitting in Starbucks, you can become an almost quasi-expert in just about anything in about 2 to 3 weeks of diligent and hard-core study online. You can go onto Google Scholar and read all the latest white papers, and research papers on a given subject.

You can go to YouTube and download videos of actual university professors teaching classes and giving lectures. You can go onto Wikipedia and learn "all the world's knowledge" on a given subject. You can go onto Google Earth and fly over a region of the world, and zoom in to really get an understanding of the layout of the city or area.

You can join social networks and talk with other qualified experts in the field, some that may have been in the industry for 10 to 20 years and ask them questions and start up dialogs. Now I'm not saying that you can get a PhD or an advanced degree array of knowledge on a given subject by spending only 2 to 3 weeks online. But I would submit to you that you can brush up against the 80/20 rule by giving 100% of your efforts for a 2 to 3 week period on any given top.

They say that 80% of the people in any given industry are just placeholders, while 20% of the people are the movers and shakers. If you can get to the top of the 80% in that short amount of time you will be brushing up against those that really know what they're doing in that industry or area of human endeavor. At that point you will be at a place and have enough knowledge to ask very good questions, and then maybe you can break into that 20%. Please consider all this.