I never let schooling interfere with my education

I was a total failure at school, which I attended in my home country Germany in the sixties and seventies. I mean I didn’t even manage to finish high-school. One of my greatest hang-ups were languages.

In fact, I had to repeat several grades because I was so lousy at English and Latin. My classmates were at the tender age of 15 when I decided, being 19 at the time, to kiss the whole thing good-bye.

I’ve learned over the past 30 years three foreign languages. In fact, the first one I learned, Greek, when I was living in Greece, I have forgotten already. So much for my hang-up with languages.

However, at the age of 14, I started reading the newspapers – every day. Nobody told me to do so, there was no reward, I couldn’t even impress the girls with my knowledge of current affairs – I just did it.

It had, however, a great impact on my social sciences lesson, or, as it was called in Germany at that time, politics classes. There I reigned, entered into hot debates with my teachers, and got the best grades.

That didn’t help me though with my grades in the subjects that counted, like mathematics, let’s say….

Over the years I’ve given English and German conversation classes to a host of people that were a lot older than me at the time. They were mostly educated, high-level executives in multinational companies in Mexico-City.

The classes all started with the same pattern. I prepared a class, looked up a topic (usually related to economics and business in general) and prepared exercises. After the first five or so classes there was no need for me anymore to either bring any material or prepare a lesson plan. I just showed up, they (or their secretaries) served me my coffee, and we had a long chat.

Those chats covered a whole variety of subjects, and they were always held in the language I was supposed to be teaching (they had, after all, to justify somehow to the human resources department the money I got paid….)

With some of them I worked literally for years, twice a week, in their office. I must have given them something!

My real education is a life-education. I am widely read, know a lot about history, particularly that of the 20^th century, know even more about business, and I’m an expert in personal development.

So I don’t know. There must be something I must have learned over the years, but whatever it is, I didn’t learn it at school.