[Suits]

(12-23-2015 11:13 PM)PhDre Wrote:  

^^Suits, first of all congratulations on the business success.

However, your gap years were not the typical gap years. You state it yourself:

(12-23-2015 08:41 PM)Suits Wrote:  

I took a gap year off after high school, went to Japan for three months and then spent nine months working a job that paid slightly better than minimum wage to save for university.

The year was so beneficial that I ended up pausing my university education three times to take another year off. While some folks even here on the forum have derided my decision to drag out my university education over 8 years, what they don't realize is that none of that time was wasted.

Any time I took off was used either to earn money for school or towards my goal of becoming fluent in an East Asian language.

You had a clear goal and you wasted no time in achieving it. This is completely different from OP's situation who asks if he should take time off to travel.

As for the word career, I meant it in the broadest sense possible.

Even if you want your own business (I think this can indeed be the most rewarding career choice - both financially and emotionally), you have no years to waste. You stated it yourself; you spent every year saving money for uni (and maybe already for your business?) and building your skill set.

Every year where you aren't doing these things, you are wasting precious time of your life, you are wasting time you could have spent on your own company and you are spending money without increasing your future earning potential (or earning any money at all).

Agreed. But I don't think people are failing because they take a gap year. I think that the type of people who end up taking a gap year are those who lack direction -- now and in the future.

In my case, since I ended up focusing on Chinese and abandoning Japanese, you could say that I wasted my time, but I benefitted from a lot of personal development. I also learned things about language skills development that provide inspiration to this day as I develop my own business (language education products industry).

My point is that we shouldn't knock gap years outright. We should rather be encouraging young men not to waste their time.

A gap year can be valuable if you aren't doing to because you simply lack direction and purpose.

I have a simple maxim for life: always be learning.

That's a good basis to live life by whether you are taking time off from school or going to university. Don't study something that doesn't teach you anything.

I think I wasted far more time studying things in university that had no career utility than I did taking four gap years.

In fact, three of those four years were dedicated to learning Chinese. If I'd take four gap years and gone to learn four different languages in four different places, it would have been a waste of time.

But since I kept returning to China, a was able to develop a specific skill until it became useful. Right now, my ability to speak Chinese at a conversationally fluent level is opening an unbelievable number of doors.

Quote:

One more question: did you already anticipate this business opportunity (or similar opportunities) many years ago and is that the reason you chose to pursue your degree and mastery of Chinese? If that is the case, then you are truly far ahead of most people.

I never anticipated that I'd be doing what I'm doing now. What I've done is taken a very simple thing and learned to do it very well. As such, I'm probably the only guy in the world doing what I'm doing. I say this because I'm made a genuine effort to seek out others doing work in the same niche to avoid wasting time forging a complete new trail and have had no success in finding any evidence that there are others out there.

I won't post precisely what I do for reasons of anonymity, but it's nothing more that specializing in a extremely effective system of language education that I developed based on several years of teaching experience as I observed what helped students learn and what didn't.

For me, teaching English was just an easy way to make money to support myself while I exposed myself to the Chinese language by living in mainland China. It paid the bills and kept my schedule open to putting myself in situations that forced me to improve my Chinese language skills.

I never thought that I would build a business in this field.

However, I did predict that speaking Chinese would come in handy. I knew this before 2004 when I was still in high school. I went to an international school where about 100 kids from Hong Kong, Korea and Mexico were benefitting from learning English in Canada. I figured that they would have the leg up on me, so once I graduated high school, I immediately set to work trying to replicate their experience overseas.

Eventually, I started to realize that simply language skills on their own were pretty useless and needed to be combined with another skillset to be valuable. For me, that was ESL teaching.

Being able to speak Chinese has been very valuable, because it allows me to speak directly with parents of students and this impresses them greatly. It also makes them feel comfortable and more willing to spend money on their children's education, because they can speak directly to an actual teacher about the strategy being used to help their child learn English.

This self-marketing ability is proving to be an asset and I help schools that want to use my products and teaching system to promote their new English classes. There are virtually no language schools in existence in China that let foreign teachers anywhere near the marketing process, outside of teaching demonstration classes.

It's a breath of fresh air for parents to get the questions answered directly by a genuine foreign teacher, as opposed to being told sweet lies by a sales person. Being to speak Chinese makes that possible to me. Without that skill, I'd be unable to go in the business direction that I'm currently going in.