Non scholam sed vitam discimus.
Not for school, but for life we learn (translated from Latin).

In school you are taught that you don’t learn for school or for the teacher or for the parents, but you learn for yourself and for life. But you don’t really understand that then, I surmise – at least I didn’t, although I always pleased whoever asked me by giving the right answer: “for myself, of course”.

But in the end, it is absolutely irrelevant for whom or for what reward you learn something. This may sound like sacrilege for the thoughtful and enthusiastic educator who wants his disciples to understand the value of self-guided learning, but bear with me.

It all boils down to this simple fact: what you have learned stays with you – independently of your original motivation to do so. And very often, later in life, you feel quite grateful, that you actually learned it nevertheless, maybe despite of certain difficulties or even having a grudge or a strong repulsion against it.

What you have learned stays with you – independently of your original motivation.

So it was for me. Many things I did, learned and created during my PhD thesis were not for myself, although ultimately it, of course, led me to earn my PhD. But I did those things to please my supervisor. And to get some attaboy-style praise back from him. Yet, what I have done at that time forms now the very foundation of what I am and what I do. So even though my purpose was a completely different one at the time, and I would not have been able to foresee how what I did could be possibly of any use later in my life, I benefit now from what I have learned and created tremendously.

The important thing is just to do it, just to learn it, independently of what motivation you might have. By doing it, you will learn and the learned processes will stay with you and benefit you later.

Simply put: keep learning every day, even if you don’t know if it will be any use to you later.

Generally, humans are very bad at predicting where they will be in the future, a year from now, 5 years from now or 20 years from now. Thus, knowing what you should learn to be where you want to be at a given time in the future is almost always futile. However, with the benefit of the hindsight, a simple heuristic strategy seems to serve you well in any life situation: any (short-sighted) motivation you might have to learn something is good, any (equally short-sighted) reluctance to learn something is bad. Consequently, try to find any kind of motivation, even a completely misguided one, like pleasing your teachers, parents or whoever you want to impress, and learn what you have to learn. You will profit from what you have learned, independently of your original motivations. Whatever you learn will shape you in ways, which you cannot predict. It will broaden your horizon, at the very least.

Thus, learn for school or learn for life, or for any other motivation; just make sure that you learn it.