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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."
I think that when the *very first word* in your story is misspelled, you should probably hand in your "Lil' Editors' Fun Club" membership card.
You know, I kind of doubt it would really be possible to convice a highschooler that they really will wish they studied harder once they're an adult.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
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.
I wish I'd known that when I started dating my first wife in college that she would turn out to be such a f****g b***h and gone running the other way.
From his couldn't-give-it-because-he-got-uninvited-to-the-h igh-school speech:
"There is some variation in natural ability"
No wonder his visit got the veto! That's public school sacriledge! Actually, it's bad news at Harvard now, too, apparently.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I wish someone had told me to go to a real library, a college library. I wish someone had told me this in grade school. I remember checking out every Byte magazine at my local library and still wanting to know more. I didn't even bother to check out there books that say "a computer has a cpu, monitor, and keyboard". I wish someone had told me to go to computer groups when I was a lot younger. I wish someone had told me to go to colleges and hang out until I met smart people.
"brxref
The author writes:
What you need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you do.
Why do our lives have to center around friggin' work? I would rather not work at all. And most people feel the same way, if they would just admit it. If we had the adequate resources, wouldn't we choose NOT to work at all, or just work a little bit?
So what is wrong with just admitting the truth?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
It's only those obsessed with status & material wealth who get wrapped up in the notion that every worthwhile waking hour should be spent working on advancing careers and whatnot.
Power to the Peaceful
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 think the biggest cause of regret in young people is mixed messages being sent from all directions from know-it-all nannys who all regret their own youth and so want to live vicariously through others still in possession of it. Laissez faire.
There's also an important corollary to this: The opinion of high-school classmates doesn't really matter. Knowing this would have done me a lot of good. Don't bother trying to impress your peers in high school. In fact, go ahead and embarrass yourself. It won't be the end of the world. A year after graduation, no one will remember or care. If anyone does remember and care, those are the weirdos whose entire life will be spent obsessing on high school, the people who never move on with their lives, and so their opinion isn't worth much worry.
I assumed 10% return under two scenarios:
In the first $3000 is invested each year as a 15, 16, and 17 year-old, for a total of $9k put in. Then no more investing is done. At 65 you have $963,381.
Second scenario is starting to invest at 30 and putting in $3k per year until 65. A total of $108,000 is invested. At 65 you have $897,380.
The moral of the story? You can't afford not to put money away when you are young. Sacrifice early for long term gains.
Note that I am not suggesting that you stop after high school. I am suggesting that you start right now and not stop.
Lasers Controlled Games!
My wife and I talk about this a lot, because we were both smart and geeky in high school (she was also an athlete, though, so she had a much easier time of it).
... since in high school I was most interested in my female classmates.
Our primary advice to our kids will be: "It gets better."
High school will not be, and shouldn't be, "the best years of your life." People will be petty, people won't understand you. You've got to take it, and still treat other people with respect. (Even if you're smarter, you're not necessarily better -- if you're excluded, don't retreat to elitism.)
All that said, I'm not sure if "wasting time" is so bad. Young children should be encouraged to play freely, not subjected 100% to a rigorous schedule of pre-planned activities. Not sure how much that can or should carry over into teenage years.
Graham is advocating exploration of that which interests you -- in my mind, I should've been spending more time practicing social skills
i have come to the conclusion that the self-taught are the people you want to work with and for.
the self-taught have a better skillset at picking up new skillsets when the pressure is on, they're more willing to and capable of learning by experimentation, they tend to be far more flexible and diverse in their abilities and they're are often more motivated to try out new solutions.
three cheers for the autodidacts
2 1337 4 u!
Going to a four-year college and getting a degree really isn't all that important anymore. Yeah, you get a job, yeah you get money, and yeah you have fun but honestly the pay off in the end really isn't all that worth it.
Very good point, and I totally agree, seriously. As the great Judge Smails has stated, "the world needs ditch diggers to".
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
Arthur: You know, it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young.
Ford: Why, what did she tell you?
Arthur: I don't know, I didn't listen.
I agree self-taught is great, however you should be carefull not to fall in the 'I don't need school' trap.
Self teaching works best for those subjects you are really interested in, use school to bring the rest up to 'standard'.
Even if you teach yourself a subject its great to hear it again in school, the teacher will most likely teach it from another viewpoint and I have found that this can help you from knowing about it to totally understanding it.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
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.
Yes, except...
how the fuck does a 15 year old acquire $3,000?
And how the fuck does he acquire another $3,000 the next year, and the next?
If you're in debt because of college, it's a fool's errand to invest unless you can get a much better interest rate than the one you're paying on your loans. Otherwise you'd be better off paying off the loans.
Oh -- and how the hell do you find a consistent 10% return on investment? The stock market historically returns 7%, and that's about as risky as anyone should get for the long-term.
Yes, compounding interest can be very impressive, and your numbers are very pretty. But they're also very unrealistic.
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.
.. I wish I was as smart as him.
Oh, wait...
Kidding aside, this is powerful stuff. I prefer the sort of biographies James Burke does in ecxplaining history - you realize things aren't as cut and dried and holy as they seem.
I constantly tell my students and teachers that if they don't pay attention, when they get to college they'll realize what a piece of cake HS was, in grad school they'll realize how much easier undergrad was, when they get a job they'll long for the days of grad school, etc... but if they push and act like a demanding comsumer, each experience can be the best prep they can get for the next.
Demand. One of my former students who's now at CMU Robotics came back to present to current students - he showed off some of his work but then got to the heart of it - never let your teachers off the hook. If they give you a textbook answer, press them. If they say they don't know, the next thing out of their or your mouth should be 'let's find out how to find out'... Never take no for an answer from someone in charge of your future. The late Paul Brandwein used to talk about how ENcouraging students literally means increasing their courage, and DIScouraging students only serves to literally decrease their courage. You want courageous students (OK - hopefully just short of trying out for "Jackass" - but it's their skeletal system...) who truly believe they can make a difference.
I sat thru so many college courses taight by people who were a chapter ahead of us and considered themselves the World's Foremost Authority... During the 80s I could tell my computer students that the mass market software they were seeing was being done by people who had 6 months lead time and a stack of books that you too could buy. I referred them to ads asking for people with 5 years experience on technologies that were 5 years old.
The ones who saw thru the hype and had the courage and believed have done amazing things at all levels - from raising amazing kids to inventing things to changing a small corner of the world.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
> In addition, in order to be an econ major, you often have to take advanced math courses (for me it was Calc 3 so that I could take Econometrics).
If you think that's an advanced math course, I have a whole world of excitement for you. Seriously, there's wonderful stuff out there that you haven't even gotten near.
I've observed that math is a really great thing to study if you want a lot of options. With a small amount of training, you can do almost anything, because you have the critical thinking skills and the rigorous framework to understand it. I'm not saying that a math major could apply to a PhD in economics and necessarily get in without any additional training, but that it wouldn't be hard to get that training. The PhD program might even be more than interested in accepting someone who they had to train. Going the other direction would be considerably more difficult.
Another interesting example is in finance. Financial companies hire physicists and mathematicians like crazy when they can get their hands on them (I've heard they also like theoretical computer sciences). Basically, they want people with advanced mathematical training, who they can direct at the problems of finance. From what I've seen, hiring the other direction would be very, very difficult.
Math is mind-broadening. There are so many different structures and models to apply to problems in other fields. I've seen quite a few people be very sucessful simply by understanding more math than `needed' by their field, and applying it.
Lea
Edison contributed very little, his staff however contributed hugely and have never been given the credit.