Life 101

NewMexiKen first posted this two years ago.

What You’ll Wish You’d Known, a possible talk for high schoolers by Paul Graham. Interesting reading.

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.

Like Paula Poundstone, I thought adults asked kids what they wanted to be because the adults were still searching for ideas.

… If you’d asked me in high school what the difference was between high school kids and adults, I’d have said it was that adults had to earn a living. Wrong. It’s that adults take responsibility for themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it.

… It’s dangerous to design your life around getting into college, because the people you have to impress to get into college are not a very discerning audience. At most colleges, it’s not the professors who decide whether you get in, but admissions officers, and they are nowhere near as smart.

… If you think it’s restrictive being a kid, imagine having kids.

… What you learn in even the best high school is rounding error compared to what you learn in college.