Think and Grow Rich - Chapter 5

Principle 1: Specialized Knowledge

The book starts off this chapter by asserting that general knowledge, meaning knowing a little about various different areas, is not as effective as having specialized knowledge, meaning being an expert in a particular area. Appropriately, being the expert in a given area, gives you an advantage over your competitors, as all the opportunities will fall to you. For instance, if you are an expert in investment banking and someone else knows a little bit about investment banking, along with law and taxes, it is probable that the clients looking for investment banking services will choose the banker who is an expert. 

However, it is the opinion of this author that it also depends on your goals and what you want to do. To clarify, if you would like to be the owner/manager/CEO of a large company, it is required that you know a little bit about every area that the company operates in. (e.g. accounting, law, taxes, finance etc) Nonetheless, this does not imply that a CEO is not or could not be an expert in accounting and finance while knowing a little bit about the law, for instance.

Napoleon Hill continued to state that specialized knowledge should also be accompanied with a plan of action. Mere knowledge or memorisation of a topic has little effect if the application of it does not follow. 

Additionally, it is very rightly recognised that schooling is not the only way to acquire education. This is even more true today. Accordingly, it is a fact that highly successful people such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckenberg and Steve Jobs, among others, have not obtained a college degree. We live in the age of Information. We have more information that we could ever consume in the touch of a button and more extraordinarily, it could be consumed for free. As a matter of fact, someone reading this free blogpost right now could regard this as education due to the fact that he/she has learned something new. Consequently, lack of accessibility to education is no excuse. This was also emphasised by Mark Cuban in his book 'How to win in the sport of business', where he stated that he received his advantages in business from reading things that were available to everyone. It turned out that people just did not want to read it. (This is not to say that education only comes in reading. Listening to audio-books or watching videos/documentaries can be a great source of education.)

One indicator of success when studying career-wise successful people comes from the fact that the average American reads 1 book a year, whereas the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies read about 50-60 books a year. That's quite the difference. 

Furthermore, the quote from legendary investor Charlie Munger is also captivating. "Those who keep learning, will keep rising in life." While billionaire Ray Dalio also rightly acknowledged that the greatest skill you need to succeed in life is life-long learning.