Foreign Travel as Best Education

Do you want to hack the process of education?  Do you want to pile in 4 years of college into 6 months or fewer?  

It is very easy to do.  It is much cheaper than college, too.  

International travel will gain you an education about 8 times faster than formal schooling.  Why is this?  It forces you to learn, and you cannot fake this type of learning.

You are thrown into a strange land.  You must learn elements of the language.  You must become an expert at reading body language and reading faces, since you cannot communicate very well with words.  You learn shortcuts to getting your point across.  You learn how to listen to others’ tone of voice and hidden meaning.  You learn to read subtle body language shifts that you never would have noticed had you been speaking your native language.  

You will be bolder, because to get what you want, you will have to take chances in approaching people you would never have to do on your native soil.  You will have less fear too, because nobody will ridicule you that knows you very well, because you will leave these foreigners in a few months or weeks anyway.  

Foreigners will often open up to you in ways they cannot with their fellows, because they know you will be gone, and there is a confidence with them that you will not understand fully the context of the local culture in revealing some things they will fear revealing to their compatriots.  

You will find things strange about your culture simply by the lack of seeing it in the strange land.  Foreigners will have a different view of taboo or political correctness.  This will shock you at first.  Also, when you breach their political correctness taboos, it will strike you as quaint and strange, but then you will become more sympathetic as you notice your own blind ways of thinking you thought were “true” but we just cultural figments of the imagination from home you never thought about.  

So, if you want to hack education and skip college, and spend less money learning something more valuable, pick a country that speaks little or none of your native language, and stay there for 6 months.  You will return a different, better person, with an education that cannot be bought on native soil.