Success Mafia

I think it is.

It’s been dying a slow and agonizing death for several years now. Why? Don’t Koreans need English?

Most Korean children, for the last 10+ years have been forced by their parents to attend afterschool programs and academies, hagwon, to improve mainly speaking.

Consistently over that time, studies and reports have come out that Korea spends the most in English education but has the worst results.

Why?

Parents think that to get ahead and more importantly, to attend an Ivy League university, their kids have to study English.

English grammar and vocabulary classes have been a mainstay of the Korean public education system for decades now. The results are students who have large vocabularies, can read, but not write well and couldn’t talk their way into a promotion or raise if their lives depended on it.

Maybe I’m being too harsh. But, of all the Koreans I’ve met, only those who’ve been immersed in an English speaking environment speak well enough to have basic conversations. Everyone else (well over 50%) have wasted their money.

This is especially true for adults. Most can and will never make good improvement to be remotely competent in English. The reasons are numerous and varied but boil down to the inability to focus on study and practice of the language they so desperately want to speak fluently. Most just aren’t willing to put in the effort required and expect that if there is no noticeable improvement in a few days then the teacher is to blame.

Regardless, of the reasons the fact is Koreans spend a large amount of money (over $1 billion USD) every year and get the lowest return in Asia on that investment. I’m not going to put the statistics here - use Google.

A better investment, for adults and companies at least, would be to focus on more general concepts and soft skills. That is, train them on what success is and how to achieve it, then move onto skills like small talk and presenting. The practical usage of what they already have.

Until Koreans are able to focus on improving English there is no need to waste money. I may have just wrote myself out of a job but I believe there s a much bigger market out there for adult education especially.

The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.

- Vince Lombardi

I’ve been reading and re-reading the book “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill.

For those of you who don’t know what the book is about, it’s a book based on 25 years of research and interviews with 500 successful people, such as Andrew Carnegie.

Napoleon Hill was a journalist who was put to the task of writing this book by Andrew Carnegie. The book goes into the process or steps required to be successful.

From the interviews that Hill collected and distilled, he developed 13 principles that when applied will lead to success. When Hill writes about success, he does not simply mean wealth and monetary riches, but a more general definition that includes relationships, goal achievement, happiness and so on.

The first step turns out to be desire. Desire is the driving force. For a person to be successful he or she must truly want it.

If you do not truly desire success, if you are content and happy in your life then desire for improvement doesn’t exist and the pursuit of success in any form will only lead to failure. Worse, you may not even know you have failed in my opinion.

Desire for success forces you to focus on what you really want out of life. It forces you to get down to basics and plot an endpoint - your definition of success. Once you have your destination plotted the rest becomes much easier. The route you take may have several detours and the vehicle(s) that take you there may change - but the final destination will always be visible. You just need the desire to reach it.

Check out the book for yourself and start making your own interpretations of the information within. You can get your copy by clicking:

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