Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune

Jim Rohn said it years ago: formal education will make you a living, self-education will make you a fortune. I’ve been turning that one over in my head again lately, and not for sentimental reasons. The gap between what you learned at school or university and what you actually need to know next Tuesday has never felt wider. And the people I see pulling ahead — in their careers, in their businesses, in their thinking — are almost always the ones who took their own learning seriously after the formal part stopped.

The bit that strikes me now is how much easier self-education has become, and how few people are actually doing it.

The classroom you carry around

The tools sitting on most people’s laptops right now would have looked like science fiction to a teacher twenty years ago. I open Copilot in Edge while I’m reading a long article and ask it to explain the part I didn’t quite get, in the context of my industry. I drop a dense PDF into Copilot Chat and ask what I should pay attention to before a meeting. I’m in Word writing something, and I ask Copilot to challenge my argument the way a sceptical colleague would. None of that is a course. It’s a habit. And the habit is what compounds.

What I notice is that people still treat learning as a thing they do somewhere else — a course, a webinar, a conference once a year. The interesting shift is that learning has quietly moved into the flow of work. The hour you used to spend hunting for an answer is the hour where the real growth happens, if you let the tools help you instead of just hand you a result.

Curiosity is the edge now

Here’s the part I think people underestimate. Copilot won’t make you smarter on its own. It rewards the people who already ask better questions. If you go in with “summarise this”, you get a summary. If you go in with “what’s the second-order effect of this on a small business with thin margins”, you get a conversation. The technology has lifted the floor and raised the ceiling at the same time, and the gap between the two is mostly down to how curious you are.

I see this in Teams meetings as well. The people who stay sharp open Copilot afterwards and ask it what they missed, what was implied, what didn’t get said. They use the recap as a starting point, not an ending. Same meeting, same transcript — completely different outcome depending on the questions you bring.

The fortune bit

Rohn’s line isn’t really about money. The fortune he’s pointing at is the compounding effect of being someone who keeps learning when nobody is making them. A CV gets you in the door. Self-education is what decides whether you’re still useful to your business, your clients, and yourself five years from now.

The honest truth is that the formal qualifications I picked up early in my career are a smaller part of what I do today than the stuff I’ve taught myself since. And the rate at which I can teach myself something now — with Copilot in Outlook explaining a thread, in Excel walking me through a model I didn’t write, in SharePoint pointing me at the document I’d forgotten existed — is something I genuinely couldn’t have imagined a few years ago.

The classroom never closed. We just stopped recognising it for what it is — and the people who keep showing up to it are quietly building the fortune Rohn was talking about.