Tommy Collison

John recently linked me to an article by Paul Graham entitled “What You’ll Wish You’d Known” – it’s a phenomenal read. I’m going to summarize and quote from it in this post, but I seriously urge you to read it in full here.

Before being vetoed by the school authorities, Graham was to give a talk for a high school, where he planned to speak about the misconceptions about school and the future that many high school students have.

I’ll start by telling you something you don’t have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life. People are always asking you this, so you think you’re supposed to have an answer. But adults ask this mainly as a conversation starter. They want to know what sort of person you are, and this question is just to get you talking. They ask it the way you might poke a hermit crab in a tide pool, to see what it does.

He goes on to explain why plans per sé aren’t what’s important in high school – they come later. What is important and what you should be focussing on in high school is discovering what you enjoy doing. You have to work on things you like if you want to be good at what you do.

He goes on to explain that one of the difficulties in doing this because it’s hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs – after all, being a doctor is not the way it’s shown on TV. That said, it’s not impossible either – you can watch real doctors by volunteering in hospitals.

One might also run into a problem in that there are some jobs that you can’t learn about, because they don’t exist yet – most of the work I’ve done in the last ten years didn’t exist when I was in high school. The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it’s not a good idea to have fixed plans.

He goes on to talk about how the “Standard Graduation Speech” isn’t so much wrong with its theme of “don’t give up on your dreams”, so much as badly phrased, because it implies you’re mean to be bound by some plan early on. The computer world has a name for this: premature optimization. And it is synonymous with disaster. These speakers would do better to say simply: don’t give up.

The article goes on to talk about college admissions, motivations, the importance of projects and how the successful people aren’t always ridiculously clever.

I think that last point is actually one of the best parts of the article:

I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they’d seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.

Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that’s one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it’s not our fault if we can’t do something as good.

There is some variation in natural ability. Most people overestimate its role, but it does exist. If I were talking to a guy four feet tall whose ambition was to play in the NBA, I’d feel pretty stupid saying “you can do anything if you really try”.

I think this article should be compulsory reading for all those in high school now (or those who will be soon) as well as those who teach in schools. Maybe this generation will be the first whose greatest regret isn’t how much time they wasted.

Full article by Paul Graham here.

What do you wish you’d known in high school?