I grew up with a Romanian saying: “Ai carte, ai parte.” Roughly translated, it means: “If you have education, you have a better life.” Or, as my father kept telling me: “If you don’t study, you’ll end up working in a factory.”
As you can see, my family took this belief one notch further. And I carried it for most of my life. Heck, it still runs me, but at least now I’m aware of it.
So what did I do? I studied. Then I studied more. I collected degrees, trainings, certifications, and credentials like emotional insurance policies. Just in case.
Listen, I’m not here to insult education. Education helps. A lot. It can open your mind. It can give you discipline, language, confidence, and access. As the saying in English goes, “knowledge is power.”
But is the saying completely true? Do you really have no future without formal education? Do you really need the right degree, title, certificate, training, approval, stamp, diploma, and maybe a golden scroll from the Ministry of Being Good Enough, or your life turns into a total fiasco?
Life keeps showing us there isn’t one official road to a meaningful future. Most people build businesses without business degrees. Most artists sell their work without MFAs. Most coaches help people not because they have the perfect certificate, but because they’ve lived, listened, learned, fallen apart, rebuilt themselves, and grown.
Richard Branson left school at 16. Steve Jobs dropped out of college. Meanwhile, plenty of people with multiple degrees still stand in the middle of their lives asking: “Now what?” I know because I am one of them.
The saying isn’t wrong. It has value. But it’s incomplete. Education can open your mind, but it can’t always open the door for you. At some point, you still have to walk through.
My inherited belief about education helped me. But it also limited me. It made me confuse learning with permission. It made me think I needed one more degree, one more course, one more certification before I could trust what I already knew.
That’s what limiting beliefs do. They don’t always look negative. They actually look very responsible. Very respectable. Very practical. Very “I’m just being realistic.”
Maybe your inherited belief isn’t about education. Maybe it sounds like: Be practical. Don’t show off. Money is hard to make. Artists struggle. A real job is safer. You’re too old to start over. What will people say? Don’t risk what you already have. Rest when everything is done.
This week, I’m asking you: What belief did you inherit that once protected you, but now keeps you circling in place?
And what would you do if you stopped waiting for permission?