What I learned from rereading My Life and Work by Henry Ford.
An able man is a man who can do things, and his ability to do things is dependent on what he has in him.
What he has in him depends on what he started with and what he has done to increase and discipline it.
An educated man is not one whose memory is trained to carry a few dates in history.
He is one who can accomplish things.
A man who cannot think is not an educated man.
However many college degrees he may have acquired.
Thinking is the hardest work anyone can do, which is probably the reason why we have so few thinkers.
There are two extremes to be avoided.
One is the attitude of contempt towards education.
The other is the tragic snobbery of assuming that marching through an education system is a sure cure for ignorance and mediocrity.
You cannot learn in any school what the world is going to do next year.
But you can learn some of the things which the world has tried to do in former years and where it failed and where it succeeded.
If education consisted in warning the young student away from some of the false theories on which men have tried to build so that he may be saved the loss of the time in finding out by his own bitter experience its good would be unquestioned.
A mans real education begins after he has left school.
The true education is gained through the discipline of life.
That is an excerpt from the book that im going to talk to you about today, which was published 100 years ago.
And its my life and work, the autobiography of Henry Ford.
So back on episode 263 in that biography of Edwin Land, its called lands Polaroid accompanying the man who invented it.
In chapter three it goes through all the different heroes and people that Edwin Land was studying, like the great people that came before him that influenced his approach to building all of his work, really his scientific work and the building of Polaroid.
And so it's like people, there'll be like one or two paragraphs maybe like a page or two on the people that he was studying as like a young person.