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What You'll Wish You'd Known
sheck writes "Eminent computer scientist, author, painter, and dot-com millionaire, Paul Graham has written down the things he wishes somebody had told him when he was in high school in What You'll Wish You'd Known, suggesting, among other things, that students treat school like a day job, working on interesting projects to avoid what he has found to be the most common regret among adults of their high school days: wasting time."
It sounds funny, but it isn't. I wish I'd known that my math teachers through High School were PE majors and math minors. Going to a small private school in the mid-south, they were all coach/teachers (sometimes in that order).
After I got an A in College Algebra my senior year, I was sure I was ready for the CS curriculum in college. That first week of Calculus proved me wrong. What I learned later was that, despite my grades, I really didn't know math all that well.
That was 22 years ago. I've since picked up higher-level math on my own, but it would have been a lot easier if I'd been given the groundwork ahead of time.
Successfully condensing fact from the vapor of nuance since 1998.
To some extent, I'd agree...
I'm still young, just fresh out of college. While my high school days were packed with a lot of outside projects and involvement, I regret not having spent my time better in college. On the other hand, I'm still young enough to see my brothers and a few friends in the same situation.
The result is that I'm able to spend my time better now, which will certainly pay off later. While you can look back and realize that you might have spent your time better (who doesn't wish they'd invested in some tech stocks at the right time?) you can also feel satisfied knowing that you weren't wasting all of it on something with no payoff. I spent so many hours of college seeing how fast I could beat each level of the 8-bit Mario Super Bros.
Speaking of wasting time, I think my Slashdot break has gone on long enough.
From his essay:
"Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists--except that I'm not kidding--I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work--and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs--they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It really depends on what you want to do.
If you want to be a writer, say, just about the only thing a formal education can give you is an understanding of grammar and spelling. (/.ers, take note.) You do need this. After that, though, the way to learn to be a writer is by writing; also by reading, because editors (and readers) can always spot a manuscript written by someone who hasn't read very much. They tend to be cliche-ridden, among other flaws, because if you haven't read a lot, you won't know what everyone else has done before you. Writing, in short, is learned by watching and by doing. I suspect that this generalizes to other arts.
On the other extreme, if you want to be a scientist, well, if you think you're going to learn enough about any scientific field to make a meaningful contribution to the human body of knowledge in that area without a formal education, you're insane. This has generally been the case throughout history (contrary to legend, both Newton and Einstein had rigorous formal educations) but it's even more true now, for the simple reason that most of the science that can be done by gifted amateurs has already been done. We know a lot about the way the universe works, and you have to know what we already know before you can add new knowledge into the mix. The romantic image of the lone amateur working away on some brilliant new conception of the universe that has so far eluded all those smart-ass PhD's with their books and fancy papers may be appealing, but the truth of the matter is, if that's the mold you try to fit, you're most likely to end up like these guys.
Most other fields are somewhere in between. There are a lot of successful businessmen with lots of formal education, and others without. Skilled trades, as mentioned by the GP poster, are largely learned on the job -- but they also have a rigorous and largely formalized system of education within the trade; "apprentice", "journeyman", and "master" are words with well-understood meanings, and if you want to make your living as a plumber or electrician or carpenter you'd best understand them. Programming (to bring the discussion home) is also in between. There are a few self-taught genius hackers out there, but there are a lot more self-taught people who think they're genius hackers but whose code is absolute garbage. Etc.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
"Speaking of wasting time, I think my Slashdot break has gone on long enough."
Not as long as mine...I own my own business so I get to read the whole thing. Which brings me to my pet "Wish I'd Know This In School" peeve, which is why didn't anyone, not even my parents, tell me that I could actually start my own business and not have to necessarily go and get a job working for someone else.
During the last year of the English equivalent of high school, me and my classmates would go to the career counselling officer for lessons on how to get a job. We'd also take day trips local businesses and watch people we'd seen in the year above ours working at their little desks or operating machinery. We even took a few trips to local coal mines which really freaked me out (Anyone seen Kes? that was me).
Luckily I was interested in playing music - joined a couple of local bands - moved to London - joined a band that toured the World - moved to the Pacific NW - got a life - and managed get the hell out of the cycle of horrible, depressing life I was faced with, but it really needn't have been that way.
How about one single hour a week about how to start your own business. Or how to handle money that your business will generate, or marketing your business, Etc Etc Etc. instead there was nothing. It was ALL about how to get a job.
Needless to say we all knew that the rich kids at the private school down the road were being taught how to hire losers, or how to stay rich, so there was never any real mystery as to why things were the way they were, but I still feel sorry for my classmates.
By the time you are old enough to want to make a list of things to tell young people they need to do to be happy, you are too old to relate to any young person in a meaningful or influential way. But inevitably, generation after generation, the old people are compelled to spew advice which the young will absorb, but ignore, until they themselves are old and ready to acknowledge its correctness (and then to futilely victimize that generation with advice).
I was the exact opposite. Believed everything I was told and took it to heart. Worked away. Worried about high school grades. Worried about college and prepared for "the real world" in the manner they told me. Once got old enough to gain my own experience and go into the real world, I realized it was all not true, and if it was ever true, it belonged to a world that hadn't existed for several decades. It's good that kids ignore or take what they're told with a grain of salt. Nothing about the wisdom my father gave to me about the white collar business world of the 60's pertains to the casual dress IT world of the 00's. There are no life long careers. Kissing ass just makes you the butt of office jokes. Unless you're looking at a really good college and scholarships, high school grades or even graduating don't matter. Once you have the piece of paper for your degree, your college grades don't matter unless you're attempting grad school. Once you have experience, your piece of paper doesn't matter unless it' used as a bullet item to impress some MBA. The most important thing to getting a job on your resume is the reference who turns it in to the person hireing and says "this is a friend of mine."
No doubt, when I pass this wisdom to my own children, it will be irrelevant to the new world they live in.