Play the Whistle

In Rugby, unlike Football, you are taught to play the whistle. For the same reason, you don't celebrate in Baseball or Softball by throwing the ball up like you do in Cricket. The game carries on. I can still remember teammates getting very upset with me as I celebrated a great catch, and two people ran in. You have to know your game.

Exams at school are very much the same. Being good at exams is more important than being good at the subject you are doing. You need to know what the examiner is asking in their mind and how they want the question answered. You need to realize that the examiner is probably tired, overworked, and underpaid. You want to make their job easy. So they recognize the answer they are looking for quickly.

Kids are forced into deciding their identity in industrialized education far too early. The real skill learned at school is less to do with the subject, and more to do with the container. The same is later true of businesses. All businesses boil down to being able to articulate an offer in a recognizable way... then putting that in a container you can charge for. What you do isn't who you are. What you get paid isn't what you are worth. Most of us spend a lot of time doing what we have to. Who we are is much deeper than that.

Two mentors that stick out for me (among many) were Mr Simon, and David O'Brien. 

Mr Simon was a giant of a man who taught me History when I was 12. Except what he really taught me was how to summarise. To find the keywords, and build memory trees. The first few minutes of all my exams for the next 20 years were vomiting memorised cheat sheets onto a piece of paper to refer to when panic set in. The keywords were the ones the examiners would be after.

David was my first big boss post-university. My boss's boss's boss. His trick was really simple, but effective. Exams are largely about time management. Don't give an essay for a 3 mark question. Don't answer a 50 mark essay question with a 3 mark answer. The (post university) exams I did were all 180 minutes for 100 marks. That meant you could plan to spend 8 minutes on a 5 mark question (1.6 minutes per mark). 1.6 rather than 1.8 because you wanted a Buffer to check your work, and because it is easier to just say 5 minutes for a 3 mark question than be precise. Time runs out, you move on. The first few minutes are where you get the most marks.

Exams then become about practice. At school level, you can treat any subject like history if you do enough past papers. It becomes about match fitness, and practicing under exam conditions rather than the underlying content.

If all this sounds cynical or not what education should be about, you are right. Except you can fight the system by ignoring it, or you can outplay it. Like Richie McCaw, know the rules well enough to break them.

Money is exactly the same. Hating it is really unhelpful. It is far better to conquer it. Instead of working for money, you can learn to make it work for you. Then you get to play the game however you want.

But first, play the whistle.