Finance classes are an interesting thing. On the one hand, you have got a good fundamental approach to both building businesses and analyzing how well they are performing being offered to you. But on the other hand, as with all of the different types of education, you are also being handed down the various different prejudices that characterize your professors and where they have all come from. While taking finance classes can be a great way to learn a lot of things about how money works, and how it flows all over the world, it can also become a sort of intellectual prison which keeps you from doing the best that you possibly can on your own. Remember that education can occasionally do as much harm as good, and consider what your actual goals with your financial classes might be. If they are in line with what the courses are admonishing, then you would do well to take them.
A course that teaches you all about the flow of cash through a business is an invaluable tool if you should ever become a professional investor later in life. Since you will hopefully make plenty of money from your career, and not just waste it all on trivial things, you are bound to want to invest in something at some point. While you are probably never going to rival Warren Buffett’s investing acumen, you are still going to be able to learn an awful lot about how cash goes in, what it does inside of the business, and how it leaves it a stronger (or a weaker) place.
It is fairly easy to lie to a person’s face, through the use of craftily chosen words and mannerisms which are designed to either keep a person guessing or put them at ease. If you are well versed in reading balance sheets, cash flow statements and other fact sheets that reveal pretty much everything, however, it is just about impossible to lie to you in that regard. Unless they have been forged, your finance classes will teach you how to see the truth.
