What Aristotle Said About Training

It is tempting to think that 21st century considerations would never have entered the thoughts of people years – or even centuries – ago. But although working environments and technology are changing constantly, some fundamentals remain relevant.
For example, Aristotle, the third-century BC Greek philosopher, might not have known a PC if it fell on him out of a flying saucer, but he knew a thing or two about human nature. Here are some of his insights, which apply equally well to 21st century attitudes to education and training:

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.
You might not hear Sir Alan Sugar saying it on The Apprentice, but you can see Aristotle’s point.

Learning is not child’s play; we cannot learn without pain.
Yes, training/learning can get harder as we get older, but it has to be done.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
In other words, the more knowledge we have on which to draw, the better equipped we are to assess problems or ideas we may not have come across before.

But it wasn’t just Aristotle who had views on this sort of thing long before we did.

The man who made the tyres for Henry Ford’s Model T, Harvey Samuel Firestone, clearly knew a thing or two about running a business:
It is only as we develop others that we permanently succeed.

And how about this for a damning indictment of those who don’t move with the times?
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. (Peter Drucker, 1909-2005, Austrian born US management guru, writer and business thinker.)