What You'll Wish You'd Known - The Diigo Meta page

• 19 Nov 19
  

  buchmiller

  education career

• 01 Dec 17
  

  Rita Zerrizuela
  • something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life.
  • my first priority was to learn what the options were. You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. 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.
  • it turns out to be hard, partly because it's hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs.
  • 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.
  • what someone else with your abilities can do, you can do; and don't underestimate your abilities.
  • Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.
  • I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.
  • It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.
  • Because a glider doesn't have an engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places  to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind.
  • Look for smart people and hard problems. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you can find such a clump, it's probably worthwhile to join it.
  • Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be  able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense.
  • Ambition
    
    In practice, "stay upwind" reduces to "work on hard problems." And  you can start today. I wish I'd grasped that in high school.
  • adults take responsibility for themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it. Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.
  • What I mean by getting something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to  draw the human face from life.
  • Corruption
    
    
  • It was like someone getting fouled in a soccer game and saying, hey, you fouled me, that's against the rules, and walking off the field in indignation. Fouls happen.  The thing to do when you get fouled is not to lose your cool. Just keep playing. <!-- Don't even foul the guy back; if you really want  revenge, you'll make him more unhappy by winning the game than by elbowing him in the jaw. -->
    
    By putting you in this situation, society has fouled you.
  • Curiosity
    
    And what's your real job supposed to be? Unless you're Mozart,  your first task is to figure that out. What are the great things to work on? Where are the imaginative people? And most importantly, what are you interested in?
  • The most powerful sort of aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests are often acquired tastes.
  • passion is a bad word for it. A better name would be curiosity.
    
  • Curiosity turns work into play.
  • They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.
  • If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity  about a promising question.
  • It can take years to zero in on a productive question, because it can take years to figure out what a subject is really about.
  • That's what you need to do: find a question that makes the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's compellingly mysterious.
  • Now
    
    If it takes years to articulate great questions, what do you do now, at sixteen? Work toward finding one. Great questions don't appear suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes them congeal is experience.
  • The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost.
  • They all knew their work like a piano player knows the keys. So  when something seemed amiss to them, they had the confidence to notice it.
  • Choose a project that will take less than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish. Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially  at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever  seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes  self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This could take years.)
  • Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be on the path to some goal you're supposed to have. Paths can bend a lot more than you think. So let the path grow out the project. The most important thing is to be excited about it, because it's by doing that you  learn.
  • Don't disregard unseemly motivations. One of the most powerful is the desire to be better than other people at something.
  • Another powerful motivator is the desire to do, or know, things you're not supposed to. Closely related is the desire to do something audacious.
  • in the short term, the quality of one's work is only a small component of fame.  I should have been less worried about doing something that seemed cool, and just done something I liked. That's the actual road to coolness anyway.
  • The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn.
    
  • You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age.
  • Adults care just as much what other people think, but they get to be more selective about the other people.
    
    I have about thirty friends whose opinions I care about, and the opinion of the rest of the world barely affects me. The problem in high school is that your peers are chosen for you by  accidents of age and geography, rather than by you based on respect for their judgement.
  • [5] The key to wasting time is distraction. Without distractions it's too obvious to your brain that you're not doing anything with it, and you start to feel uncomfortable.
  • What you learn in even the best high school is rounding error compared to what you learn in college.
  • There are simply no outside forces pushing high school to be good.
  • there are few things worse than close supervision by someone who doesn't understand what you're doing.

  37 more annotations...

• 17 Apr 17
  

  pick_known

  面试

  • "what someone else with your abilities can do, you can do; and don't underestimate your abilities."
  • If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.
  • In practice, "stay upwind" reduces to "work on hard problems."
  • Corruption
  • Instead treat school as a day job. As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet. You're done at 3 o'clock, and you can even work on your own stuff while you're there.
  • relativity
  • That's what you need to do: find a question that makes the world interesting.
  • 
    The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost.
  • A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is  to find good books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad. [9] So don't assume a subject is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. You have to search actively for  the tiny number of good books.
  • The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn.

  8 more annotations...

• 30 Mar 17
  

  del.icio.us Favorites Safari

• 07 Mar 17
  

  alexsommer123
  • 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.
  • But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them 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.
  • What they really mean is, don't get demoralized. Don't think that  you can't do what other people can. And I agree you shouldn't  underestimate your potential. People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only  exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude  biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact 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.
  • 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.
  • Suppose you're a college freshman deciding whether to major in math  or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.
    
    Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn't have an engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places  to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for "don't give  up on your dreams." Stay upwind.
  • Well, you don't, and that's what you need to find out. <!-- I can give you some tips on how to recognize upwind. --> Look for smart people and hard problems. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you can find such a clump, it's probably worthwhile to join it. But it's not straightforward to find these, because there is a lot of  faking going on.
  • To a newly arrived undergraduate, all university departments look much the same. The professors all seem forbiddingly intellectual and publish papers unintelligible to outsiders. But while in some fields the papers are unintelligible because they're full of hard ideas, in others they're deliberately written in an obscure way to seem as if they're saying something important. This may seem a  scandalous proposition, but it has been experimentally verified, in the famous Social Text affair. Suspecting that the papers published by literary theorists were often just intellectual-sounding nonsense, a physicist deliberately wrote a paper full of intellectual-sounding nonsense, and submitted it to a literary theory journal, which published it.
  • The best protection is always to be working on hard problems.  Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't.  Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be  able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense.
    
    Well, this seems a grim view of the world, you may think. What I'm telling you is that you should worry? Yes, but it's not as bad as it sounds. It's exhilarating to overcome worries. You don't see faces much happier than people winning gold medals. And you know why they're so happy? Relief.
    
    I'm not saying this is the only way to be happy. Just that some kinds of worry are not as bad as they sound.
  • 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. Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.
  • When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they nearly all say the same thing: that they wasted so much time. If you're wondering what you're doing now that you'll regret most later, that's probably it.
  • I'm not saying you shouldn't hang out with your friends-- that you should all become humorless little robots who do nothing but work. Hanging out with friends is like chocolate cake. You enjoy it more if you eat it occasionally than if you eat nothing but chocolate  cake for every meal. No matter how much you like chocolate cake, you'll be pretty queasy after the third meal of it. And that's  what the malaise one feels in high school is: mental queasiness.
  • Right now most of you feel your job in life is to be a promising college applicant. But that means you're designing your life to satisfy a process so mindless that there's a whole industry devoted to subverting it. No wonder you become cynical. The malaise you feel is the same that a producer of reality TV shows or a tobacco  industry executive feels. And you don't even get paid a lot.
  • In retrospect this was stupid. It was like someone getting fouled in a soccer game and saying, hey, you fouled me, that's against the rules, and walking off the field in indignation. Fouls happen.  The thing to do when you get fouled is not to lose your cool. Just keep playing.
  • Instead treat school as a day job. As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet. You're done at 3 o'clock, and you can even work on your own stuff while you're there.
  • One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no  self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything,  not even a cup of coffee.
  • Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in.
  • I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You  probably need about the amount you need to go running. I'm often  reluctant to go running, but once I do, I enjoy it. And if I don't  run for several days, I feel ill. It's the same with people who  do great things. They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.
  • It can take years to zero in on a productive question, because it can take years to figure out what a subject is really about. To take an extreme example, consider math. Most people think they hate math, but the boring stuff you do in school under the name "mathematics" is not at all like what mathematicians do.
    
    The great mathematician G. H. Hardy said he didn't like math in  high school either. He only took it up because he was better at it than the other students. Only later did he realize math was interesting-- only later did he start to ask questions instead of merely answering them correctly.
  • That's what you need to do: find a question that makes the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's compellingly mysterious.
  • Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be on the path to some goal you're supposed to have. Paths can bend a lot more than you think. So let the path grow out the project. The most important thing is to be excited about it, because it's by doing that you  learn.
  • A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is  to find good books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad. [9] So don't assume a subject is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. You have to search actively for  the tiny number of good books.
  • The only real difference between adults and high school kids is that adults realize they need to get things done, and high school kids don't. That realization hits most people around 23. But I'm letting you in on the secret early. So get to work. Maybe you can be the first generation whose greatest regret from high school isn't how much time you wasted.
  • [4] The second biggest regret was caring so much about unimportant things. And especially about what other people thought of them.
    
    I think what they really mean, in the latter case, is caring what random people thought of them. Adults care just as much what other people think, but they get to be more selective about the other people.
    
    I have about thirty friends whose opinions I care about, and the opinion of the rest of the world barely affects me. The problem in high school is that your peers are chosen for you by  accidents of age and geography, rather than by you based on respect for their judgement.
  • [10] Your teachers are always telling you to behave like adults. I wonder if they'd like it if you did. You may be loud and disorganized, but you're very docile compared to adults. If you actually started acting like adults, it would be just as if a bunch of adults had been transposed into your bodies. Imagine the reaction of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being told they had to ask permission to go the bathroom, and only one person could go at a time. To say nothing of the things you're taught. If a bunch of actual adults suddenly found themselves trapped in high school, the first thing they'd do is form a union and renegotiate all the rules with the administration.

  22 more annotations...

• 09 Oct 16
  

  jithinpaulm
  • Copy

    Delete

    Closely related is the desire to do something audacious.

    Copy

    Delete

    Most books are
  • And that's one  reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy.
  • "stay upwind
  • Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience.
  • But in ambitious adults, instead of drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep. The mud flat morphs into a well.
  • One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline.
  • Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in.
  • They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.
  • The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost.
  • One of the most powerful is the desire to be better than other people at something.
  • Closely related is the desire to do something audacious.
  • Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad.
  • So don't assume a subject is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. You have to search actively for  the tiny number of good books.

  11 more annotations...

• 20 Aug 16
  

  lamothel

  Speech idea

• 13 May 16
  

  abecrystal

  education

• 07 Sep 15
  

  rblimey

  wisdom career life motivation

• 12 May 15
  

  logandanielcox
• 27 Apr 15
  

  ramsmith
  • It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.
  • The best protection is always to be working on hard problems.  Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't.  Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be  able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense.
  • It's that adults take responsibility for themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it. Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.
  • You may be thinking, we have to do more than get good grades. We have to have extracurricular activities. But you know perfectly well how bogus most of these are. Collecting donations for a charity is an admirable thing to do, but it's not hard. It's not getting something done. What I mean by getting something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to  draw the human face from life. This sort of thing rarely translates into a line item on a college application.
    
  • Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something, or to answer some question. Choose a project that will take less than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish. Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially  at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever  seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes  self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This could take years.)
  • Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be on the path to some goal you're supposed to have. Paths can bend a lot more than you think. So let the path grow out the project. The most important thing is to be excited about it, because it's by doing that you  learn.

  4 more annotations...

• 06 Dec 14
  

  Jordan Goldman

  January 2005 (I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.) When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious.

  misc. start-up tips

• 18 Nov 14
  

  shipa1

  Graduation

• 03 Nov 14
  

  takashi wu
  • hermit crab
  • tide pool
  • forbiddingly
  • unintelligible
  • suspense
  • exhilarating
  • Ambition
  • queasy
  • malaise
  • the NCOs
  • charade
  • aptitude
  • can flog
  • diligently
  • congeal
  • amiss
  • Don't worry
  • audacious
  • ledger
  • existentialist
  • cumbersome
  • craving
  • blockhead
  • docile
  • transposed

  23 more annotations...

• 31 Oct 14
  

  sofiemsmith

  This is what grade 12/year 13 students should read when leaving high school. http://t.co/sfmi17dX5y

  #iegsibhist

• 21 Sep 14
  

  Jarkko Saltiola

  blog

  • every May, speakers all over the country fire up the Standard  Graduation Speech, the theme of which is: don't give up on your dreams. I know what they mean, but this is a bad way to put it, because it implies you're supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on. The computer world has a name for this: premature optimization. And it is synonymous with disaster.
  • Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn't have an engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places  to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind.
• 17 Sep 14
  

  Sequoia Taylor

  lessonslearned

• 03 Jun 14
  

  zinbielbear
  • first priority was to learn what the options were
  • 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.
  • there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them yet
  • People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only  exaggerate this illusion
  • We need to cut the Standard Graduation Speech down to, "what someone else with your abilities can do, you can do; and don't underestimate your abilities.
  • Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.
  • Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.
  • Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn't have an engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places  to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for "don't give  up on your dreams." Stay upwind.
  • The best protection is always to be working on hard problems.
  • Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be  able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense.
    
    Well, this seems a grim view of the world, you may think. What I'm telling you is that you should worry? Yes, but it's not as bad as it sounds. It's exhilarating to overcome worries. You don't see faces much happier than people winning gold medals. And you know why they're so happy? Relief.
  • that they wasted so much time. If you're wondering what you're doing now that you'll regret most later, that's probably it. [4]
  • And what's your real job supposed to be?
  • But in ambitious adults, instead of drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep
  • Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in

  12 more annotations...

• 28 Apr 14
  

  Betsy Barnhart

  graduation

• 21 Apr 14
  

  Marcus Tay
  • premature optimization.
  • aduation Speech down from "don't give up on your dreams" to "what someone else can do, you can do
  • "what someone else with your abilities can do, you can do; and don't underestimate your abilities.
  • Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations.
  • Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.
  • ard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be  able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough
  • Hanging out with friends is like chocolate cake. You enjoy it more if you eat it occasionally than if you eat nothing but chocolate  cake for every meal. No matter how much you like chocolate cake, you'll be pretty queasy after the third meal of it
  • most powerful sort of aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests are often acquired tastes.
  • you can't get anything done if you're always asking why about everything. But in ambitious adults, instead of drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep. The mud flat morphs into a well.
  • They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in
  • t's the same with people who  do great things. They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.
  • find a question that makes the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's compellingly mysterious.
  • Choose a project that will take less than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish. Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially  at first.
  • The most important thing is to be excited about it, because it's by doing that you  learn.
  • Another powerful motivator is the desire to do, or know, things you're not supposed to. Closely related is the desire to do something audacious.
  • less worried about doing something that seemed cool, and just done something I liked. That's the actual road to coolness anyway.

  14 more annotations...

• 20 Mar 14
  

  nimmypal

  success education advice speech

• 26 Feb 14
  

  Cory Ringer
• 22 Feb 14
  

  Konstantinos
• 18 Feb 14
  

  Matija Kecman
  • It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.
    
  • As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for "don't give  up on your dreams." Stay upwind.
  • To a newly arrived undergraduate, all university departments look much the same. The professors all seem forbiddingly intellectual and publish papers unintelligible to outsiders. But while in some fields the papers are unintelligible because they're full of hard ideas, in others they're deliberately written in an obscure way to seem as if they're saying something important. This may seem a  scandalous proposition, but it has been experimentally verified, in the famous Social Text affair. Suspecting that the papers published by literary theorists were often just intellectual-sounding nonsense, a physicist deliberately wrote a paper full of intellectual-sounding nonsense, and submitted it to a literary theory journal, which published it.
  • t's exhilarating to overcome worries. You don't see faces much happier than people winning gold medals. And you know why they're so happy? Relief.
  • Most people like to be good at what they do. In the so-called real  world this need is a powerful force. But high school students rarely benefit from it, because they're given a fake thing to do.  When I was in high school, I let myself believe that my job was to  be a high school student. And so I let my need to be good at what  I did be satisfied by merely doing well in school.
    
    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. Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.
  • The reason this got stale in middle school and high school, I now realize, is that I was ready for something else. Childhood was getting old.
    
  • You may be thinking, we have to do more than get good grades. We have to have extracurricular activities. But you know perfectly well how bogus most of these are. Collecting donations for a charity is an admirable thing to do, but it's not hard. It's not getting something done. What I mean by getting something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to  draw the human face from life. This sort of thing rarely translates into a line item on a college application.
  • Right now most of you feel your job in life is to be a promising college applicant. But that means you're designing your life to satisfy a process so mindless that there's a whole industry devoted to subverting it.
  • By putting you in this situation, society has fouled you. Yes,  as you suspect, a lot of the stuff you learn in your classes is  crap. And yes, as you suspect, the college admissions process is largely a charade. But like many fouls, this one was unintentional.
  • Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do. The best plan, I think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. Don't just do what  they tell you, and don't just refuse to. Instead treat school as a day job. As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet. You're done at 3 o'clock, and you can even work on your own stuff while you're there.
  • Curiosity turns work into play. For Einstein, relativity wasn't a book full of hard stuff he had to learn for an exam. It was a mystery he was trying to solve. So it probably felt like less work to him to invent it than it would seem to someone now to learn it in a class.
  • Now I have enough experience to realize that those famous writers actually sucked. Plenty of famous people do; in the short term, the quality of one's work is only a small component of fame.  I should have been less worried about doing something that seemed cool, and just done something I liked. That's the actual road to coolness anyway.
  • The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn.

  11 more annotations...

• 17 Feb 14
  

  Aaron Wolfson
  • People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only  exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude  biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact 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.
  • I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.
  • Look for smart people and hard problems. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you can find such a clump, it's probably worthwhile to join it.
  • Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be  able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense.
  • Fouls happen.  The thing to do when you get fouled is not to lose your cool. Just keep playing.
  • The most powerful sort of aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests are often acquired tastes.
  • Kid curiosity is broad and shallow; they ask why at random about everything. In most adults this curiosity dries up entirely. It has to: you can't get anything done if you're always asking why about everything. But in ambitious adults, instead of drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep. The mud flat morphs into a well.
  • For Einstein, relativity wasn't a book full of hard stuff he had to learn for an exam. It was a mystery he was trying to solve. So it probably felt like less work to him to invent it than it would seem to someone now to learn it in a class.
  • One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them.
  • They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.
  • If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity  about a promising question.
  • find a question that makes the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's compellingly mysterious.
  • The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost.
  • I should have been less worried about doing something that seemed cool, and just done something I liked. That's the actual road to coolness anyway.
  • A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is  to find good books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad. [9] So don't assume a subject is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. You have to search actively for  the tiny number of good books.
  • I have about thirty friends whose opinions I care about, and the opinion of the rest of the world barely affects me. The problem in high school is that your peers are chosen for you by  accidents of age and geography, rather than by you based on respect for their judgement.

  14 more annotations...

• 20 Dec 13
  

  gbradz
  • The best protection is always to be working on hard problems.  Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't.  Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be  able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense.
  • If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job. I don't mean that I'd slack in school. Working at something as a day job doesn't mean doing it badly. It means not being defined by it.
  • And that's  what the malaise one feels in high school is: mental queasiness. [5]
  • In retrospect this was stupid. It was like someone getting fouled in a soccer game and saying, hey, you fouled me, that's against the rules, and walking off the field in indignation. Fouls happen.  The thing to do when you get fouled is not to lose your cool. Just keep playing.
  • Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do. The best plan, I think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. Don't just do what  they tell you, and don't just refuse to.
  • I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no  self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything,  not even a cup of coffee.
  • Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in.
  • It's the same with people who  do great things. They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.
  • Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having fun. That's why he's so good.
  • find a way to make it interesting. That's what you need to do: find a question that makes the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's compellingly mysterious.
  • but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost.
  • Choose a project that will take less than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish. Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially  at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever  seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes  self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one.
  • Friends offer moral support (few startups are started by one person), but secrecy also has its advantages. There's something pleasing about a secret project. And you can take more risks, because no  one will know if you fail.
  • A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is  to find good books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad.
  • The only real difference between adults and high school kids is that adults realize they need to get things done, and high school kids don't.
  • I have about thirty friends whose opinions I care about, and the opinion of the rest of the world barely affects me. The problem in high school is that your peers are chosen for you by  accidents of age and geography, rather than by you based on respect for their judgement.
  • The key to wasting time is distraction. Without distractions it's too obvious to your brain that you're not doing anything with it, and you start to feel uncomfortable. If you want to measure  how dependent you've become on distractions, try this experiment: set aside a chunk of time on a weekend and sit alone and think. You can have a notebook to write your thoughts down in, but nothing else: no friends, TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, books,  newspapers, or magazines. Within an hour most people will feel a  strong craving for distraction.
  • What you learn in even the best high school is rounding error compared to what you learn in college.
  • Why does society foul you? Indifference, mainly. There are simply no outside forces pushing high school to be good. The air traffic control system works because planes would crash otherwise. Businesses have to deliver because otherwise competitors would take their customers. But no planes crash if your school sucks, and it has no competitors. High school isn't evil; it's random; but random is pretty bad.

  17 more annotations...

• 09 Sep 13
  

  AME UA
  • you can't get anything done if you're always asking why about everything.
  • One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline.
  • If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity  about a promising question.

  1 more annotation...

• 21 May 13
  

  Constantine Margiev

  notes

• 16 Apr 13
  

  Mark Hardeman

  graduation highschool

• 23 Jan 13
  

  Roxana Hadad

  What You'll Wish You'd Known - a high school graduation speech that was never delivered, but should have been

  advice education speech career essay school highschool entrepreneurship Alex

• 16 Dec 12
  

  L W

  advice reread important laurel high school college

• 02 Dec 12
  

  thongnhat313

  Speech about how to find career goal

  advice entrepreneurship career

  • what you want to do with your life
  • my first priority was to learn what the options were
  • discover what you like
  • hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs
  • don't give up
  • genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy
  • "what someone else with your abilities can do, you can do; and don't underestimate your abilities."
  • What  are your abilities?
  • the solution is to work in the other direction
  • work forward from promising situations
  • "stay upwind" reduces to "work on hard problems."
  • What I mean by getting something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to  draw the human face from life. This sort of thing rarely translates into a line item on a college application.
  • Curiosity turns work into play
  • The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost
  • Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something, or to answer some question
  • A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is  to find good books.

  14 more annotations...

• 28 Aug 12
  

  Y A
  • If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. 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.
  • But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them 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.
  • I think the solution is to work in the other direction. Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.
    
    In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there?  I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.
    
    It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.
  • If you let yourself get far downwind of good places  to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for "don't give  up on your dreams." Stay upwind.

  2 more annotations...

• 15 Jul 12
  

  Rosetta Lee

  very useful graduation speech

  resource personal education speech school teacher student inspiration cool

• 10 Jun 12
  

  Diana Gardner
• 16 Apr 12
  

  lizg880209
  • portrayed
  • premature optimization
  • demoralized
  • race apart
  • inevitably
  • streamlining the plot
  • innate genius
  • narrow
  • undergraduate
  • stale
  • admissions officers
  • Cliff's Notes,
  • it seemed par
  • retrospect
  • fouled
  • indignation
  • The thing to do when you get fouled is not to lose your cool. Just keep playing.
  • charade
  • orthogonal vector
  • aptitude
  • distorted
  • The real thing  is not something one could have for waiting on tables
  • diligently

  21 more annotations...

• 20 Feb 12
  

  Barbara Fritz

  advice education speech career

• 31 Jan 12
  

  Miroslav Kostyakov

  When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious. What will you say to high school students? So I asked them, what do you wish someone had told you in high school? Their answers were remarkably similar. So I'm going to tell you what we all wish someone had told us.

  Paul Graham саморазвитие целеполагание взросление своё место on English article mirror-0029

• 07 Jan 12
  

  Sandy Mouw
• 27 Nov 11
  

  sbeleznay

  students motivation

• 25 Nov 11
  

  aaron stephenson

  Education College

• 18 Nov 11
  

  Pippa Tick

  advice education career life ambition plan work

  • But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse  for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
  • The most powerful sort of aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests are often acquired tastes.
  • find a question that makes the world interesting.

  1 more annotation...

• 08 Nov 11
  

  Jason Graham

  ifttt delicious life education paulgraham

• 21 Sep 11
  

  Robert Martinez

  Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do. The best plan, I think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. Don't just do what they tell you, and don't just refuse to. Instead treat sch

  school university career advice

• 01 Sep 11
  

  Manraj T.
  • I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life.
  • If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were.
  • People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only  exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude  biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact 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.
  • Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations.
  • You don't see faces much happier than people winning gold medals. And you know why they're so happy? Relief.
  • It's that adults take responsibility for themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it. Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.
  • If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job. I don't mean that I'd slack in school. Working at something as a day job doesn't mean doing it badly. It means not being defined by it. I mean I wouldn't think of myself as a high school student, just as a musician with a day job as a waiter doesn't think of  himself as a waiter. [3] And when I wasn't working at my day job I'd start trying to do real work.
  • When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they nearly all say the same thing: that they wasted so much time.
  • Hanging out with friends is like chocolate cake. You enjoy it more if you eat it occasionally than if you eat nothing but chocolate  cake for every meal. No matter how much you like chocolate cake, you'll be pretty queasy after the third meal of it. And

    that's  what the malaise one feels in high school is: mental queasiness.
  • Hanging out with friends is like chocolate cake. You enjoy it more if you eat it occasionally than if you eat nothing but chocolate  cake for every meal.
  • that's  what the malaise one feels in high school is: mental queasiness.
  • You may be thinking, we have to do more than get good grades. We have to have extracurricular activities. But you know perfectly well how bogus most of these are. Collecting donations for a charity is an admirable thing to do, but it's not hard. It's not getting something done. What I mean by getting something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to  draw the human face from life. This sort of thing rarely translates into a line item on a college application.
  • It was like someone getting fouled in a soccer game and saying, hey, you fouled me, that's against the rules, and walking off the field in indignation. Fouls happen.  The thing to do when you get fouled is not to lose your cool. Just keep playing. <!-- Don't even foul the guy back; if you really want  revenge, you'll make him more unhappy by winning the game than by elbowing him in the jaw. -->
    
    By putting you in this situation, society has fouled you. Yes,  as you suspect, a lot of the stuff you learn in your classes is  crap. And yes, as you suspect, the college admissions process is largely a charade.
  • It was like someone getting fouled in a soccer game and saying, hey, you fouled me, that's against the rules, and walking off the field in indignation. Fouls happen.  The thing to do when you get fouled is not to lose your cool. Just keep playing.
  • Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do.
  • And what's your real job supposed to be? Unless you're Mozart,  your first task is to figure that out.
  • One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them.
  • Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in.
  • I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You  probably need about the amount you need to go running.
  • Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having fun.
  • If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity  about a promising question.
  • It can take years to zero in on a productive question, because it can take years to figure out what a subject is really about.
  • That's what you need to do: find a question that makes the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's compellingly mysterious.
  • If it takes years to articulate great questions, what do you do now, at sixteen? Work toward finding one.
  • The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost.
  • Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be on the path to some goal you're supposed to have. Paths can bend a lot more than you think. So let the path grow out the project. The most important thing is to be excited about it, because it's by doing that you  learn.
  • Don't disregard unseemly motivations.
  • I should have been less worried about doing something that seemed cool, and just done something I liked. That's the actual road to coolness anyway.
  • A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is  to find good books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad. [9] So don't assume a subject is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. You have to search actively for  the tiny number of good books.
  • The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn.
  • n fact, you don't  have to wait to be an adult. There's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age.
  • The only real difference between adults and high school kids is that adults realize they need to get things done, and high school kids don't.

  30 more annotations...

• 26 Aug 11
  

  Jessica Sun

  advice

  • n such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.
  • don't give up on your dreams. I know what they mean, but this is a bad way to put it, because it implies you're supposed to be bound by some plan you made 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.
  • you shouldn't  underestimate your potential.
  • We need to cut the Standard Graduation Speech down to, "what someone else with your abilities can do, you can do; and don't underestimate your abilities."
  • But while in some fields the papers are unintelligible because they're full of hard ideas, in others they're deliberately written in an obscure way to seem as if they're saying something important.
  • A distorted version of this idea has filtered into popular culture under the name "passion."
  • nd passion is a bad word for it. A better name would be curiosity.

  5 more annotations...

• 14 Aug 11
  

  Sébastien Lopez

  high schoo philosophy life personal development

  • what you want to do with your life
  • something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life
  • what you want to do with your life
  • something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life
  • something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life
  • something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life
  • something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life
  • something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life
  • what you want to do with your life
  • If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were.
  • You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. 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
  • hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs
  • volunteering
  • there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them yet
  • don't give up on your dreams
  • this is a bad way to put it, because it implies you're supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on
  • simply, don't give up
  • you shouldn't  underestimate your potential
  • what someone else can do, you can do
  • There is some variation in natural ability
  • what someone else with your abilities can do, you can do; and don't underestimate your abilities.
  • it doesn't tell you what to do anymore
  • What  are your abilities?
  • Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations
  • In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there?
  • don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options
  • Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take
  • major in math  or economics
  • math will give you more options
  • If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics
  • you want to stay upwind
  • The best protection is always to be working on hard problems
  • Hard means worry
  • There has to be suspense
  • It's exhilarating to overcome worries
  • If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job
  • Working at something as a day job
  • It means not being defined by it
  • I wouldn't think of myself as a high school student
  • And when I wasn't working at my day job I'd start trying to do real work
  • When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they nearly all say the same thing: that they wasted so much time
  • high school students aren't capable of getting anything done yet. But I don't think this is true. And the proof is that you're bored
  • The reason this got stale in middle school and high school, I now realize, is that I was ready for something else
  • You may be thinking, we have to do more than get good grades. We have to have extracurricular activities
  • 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
  • They can't tell how smart you are
  • Right now most of you feel your job in life is to be a promising college applicant. But that means you're designing your life to satisfy a process so mindless that there's a whole industry devoted to subverting it
  • Fouls happen.  The thing to do when you get fouled is not to lose your cool. Just keep playing
  • as you suspect, a lot of the stuff you learn in your classes is  crap
  • By putting you in this situation, society has fouled you
  • the college admissions process is largely a charade
  • like many fouls, this one was unintentional. [7] So just keep playing
  • Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do
  • Don't just do what  they tell you, and don't just refuse to. Instead treat school as a day job. As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet. You're done at 3 o'clock, and you can even work on your own stuff while you're there
  • what's your real job supposed to be?
  • your first task is to figure that out.
  • what are you interested in? The word "aptitude" is misleading, because it implies something innate
  • curiosity
  • Kids are curious, but the curiosity I mean has a different shape from kid curiosity
  • Kid curiosity is broad and shallow; they ask why
  • in ambitious adults, instead of drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep
  • Curiosity turns work into play
  • One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline
  • I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in
  • 
    I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You  probably need about the amount you need to go running
  • But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary
  • If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity  about a promising question
  • The great mathematician G. H. Hardy said he didn't like math in  high school
  • He only took it up because he was better at it than the other students. Only later did he realize math was interesting-- only later did he start to ask questions instead of merely answering them correctly
  • find a way to make it interesting
  • If it takes years to articulate great questions, what do you do now, at sixteen? Work toward finding one. Great questions don't appear suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes them congeal is experience. So the way to find great questions is not to search for them
  • The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost.
  • Just pick a project that seems interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something, or to answer some question. Choose a project that will take less than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish. Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially  at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever  seems most fun
  • If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes  self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one
  • Involve your friends if you want, but not too many, and only if they're not flakes
  • Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be on the path to some goal you're supposed to have. Paths can bend a lot more than you think
  • Don't disregard unseemly motivations. One of the most powerful is the desire to be better than other people at something.
  • Another powerful motivator is the desire to do, or know, things you're not supposed to. Closely related is the desire to do something audacious. Sixteen year olds aren't supposed to write novels. So if you try, anything you achieve is on the plus side of the ledger; if you fail utterly, you're doing no worse than expectations
  • Beware of bad models. Especially when they excuse laziness
  • A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is  to find good books
  • don't assume a subject is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. You have to search actively for  the tiny number of good books
  • The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn.
  • Your life doesn't have to be shaped by admissions officers. It  could be shaped by your own curiosity
  • In fact, you don't  have to wait to be an adult
  • This may sound like bullshit. I'm just a minor, you may think, I have no money, I have to live at home, I have to do what adults  tell me all day long. Well, most adults labor under restrictions  just as cumbersome, and they manage to get things done. If you think it's restrictive being a kid, imagine having kids.
  • adults realize they need to get things done, and high school kids don't. That realization hits most people around 23
  • So get to work. Maybe you can be the first generation whose greatest regret from high school isn't how much time you wasted.

  85 more annotations...

• 31 Jul 11
  

  drsidkgupta

  Biz-baniya

  • 'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life.
  • s, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you  need to do is discover what you like
  • But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them yet.
  • And I agree you shouldn't  underestimate your potential. People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart
  • In fact 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.
    
  • 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.
  • "what someone else with your abilities can do, you can do; and don't underestimate your abilities."
  • Suppose you're a college freshman deciding whether to major in math  or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.
  • To a newly arrived undergraduate, all university departments look much the same. The professors all seem forbiddingly intellectual and publish papers unintelligible to outsider
  • 'm not saying you shouldn't hang out with your friends-- that you should all become humorless little robots who do nothing but work. Hanging out with friends is like chocolate cake. You enjoy it more if you eat it occasionally than if you eat nothing but chocolate  cake for every meal.
  • 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.
  • ow I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested i
  • "Who knew how much time it would take up, how little autonomy one would have for endless years of training, and how unbelievably annoying it is to carry a beeper

  11 more annotations...

• 26 Jul 11
  

  Karen Xi
  • my first priority was to learn what the options were. You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. 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.
  • The computer world has a name for this: premature optimization.
  • And it is synonymous with disaster.
  • In fact 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.
  • just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.
  • It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.
  • As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for "don't give  up on your dreams." Stay upwind.
  • The best protection is always to be working on hard problems.  Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't.  Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be  able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense.
  • In the so-called real  world this need is a powerful force. But high school students rarely benefit from it, because they're given a fake thing to do.  When I was in high school, I let myself believe that my job was to  be a high school student. And so I let my need to be good at what  I did be satisfied by merely doing well in school.
    
    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. Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.
  • If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job. I don't mean that I'd slack in school. Working at something as a day job doesn't mean doing it badly. It means not being defined by it. I mean I wouldn't think of myself as a high school student, just as a musician with a day job as a waiter doesn't think of  himself as a waiter. [3] And when I wasn't working at my day job I'd start trying to do real work.
    
    When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they nearly all say the same thing: that they wasted so much time. If you're wondering what you're doing now that you'll regret most later, that's probably it.
  • No matter how much you like chocolate cake, you'll be pretty queasy after the third meal of it. And that's  what the malaise one feels in high school is: mental queasiness.
  • What I mean by getting something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to  draw the human face from life.

  11 more annotations...

• 30 Jun 11
  

  hartmans

  essay advice career

• 24 Jun 11
  

  Mrs. Marr

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• 11 Jun 11
  

  Per Hoel
  • I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life.
  • If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were
  • 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.
  • What  are your abilities?
  • ork forward from promising situations
  • This is what most successful people actually do anyway.
  • just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward
  • I propose that as a replacement for "don't give  up on your dreams." Stay upwind.
  • you don't, and that's what you need to find out. <!-- I can give you some tips on how to recognize upwind. --> Look for smart people and hard problems. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you can find such a clump, it's probably worthwhile to join it. But it's not straightforward to find these, because there is a lot of  faking going on
  • while in some fields the papers are unintelligible because they're full of hard ideas, in others they're deliberately written in an obscure way to seem as if they're saying something important. This may seem a  scandalous proposition, but it has been experimentally verified, in the famous Social Text affair
  • always to be working on hard problems
  • 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. Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.
  • Working at something as a day job doesn't mean doing it badly. It means not being defined by it. I mean I wouldn't think of myself as a high school student, just as a musician with a day job as a waiter doesn't think of  himself as a waiter.
  • The reason this got stale in middle school and high school, I now realize, is that I was ready for something else. Childhood was getting old
  • t'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
  • But that means you're designing your life to satisfy a process so mindless that there's a whole industry devoted to subverting it. No wonder you become cynical. The malaise you feel is the same that a producer of reality TV shows or a tobacco  industry executive feels
  • Yes,  as you suspect, a lot of the stuff you learn in your classes is  crap. And yes, as you suspect, the college admissions process is largely a charade. But like many fouls, this one was unintentional.
  • Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience
  • Curiosity turns work into play. For Einstein, relativity wasn't a book full of hard stuff he had to learn for an exam. It was a mystery he was trying to solve.
  • One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no  self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything,  not even a cup of coffee
  • Great questions don't appear suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes them congeal is experience. So the way to find great questions is not to search for them-- not to wander about thinking, what great  discovery shall I make? You can't answer that; if you could, you'd  have made it
  • but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost.
  • One of the most powerful is the desire to be better than other people at something. Hardy said that's what got him started, and I think the only unusual thing  about him is that he admitted it.
  • do, or know, things you're not supposed to
  • The only real difference between adults and high school kids is that adults realize they need to get things done, and high school kids don't

  23 more annotations...

• 07 Jun 11
  

  csy1219
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• 13 Apr 11
  

  josh porter
  • I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life.
  • You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. 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.
  • It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.
  • If you let yourself get far downwind of good places  to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for "don't give  up on your dreams." Stay upwind.
  • It's that adults take responsibility for themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it. Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.

  4 more annotations...

• 06 Apr 11
  

  MH J

  toread personal

• 25 Mar 11
  

  Chris Enck

  education advice essay speech highschool career commencement

• 24 Mar 11
  

  Grant Montgomery

  High-school graduation Dean-Shareski

  • (I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually  gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.)
• 

  Mary Ann Reilly

  "I wrote ths talk 4 a high skool. I nevr actually gave it, b/c the skool authorities vetoed the plan 2 invite me" http://bit.ly/gOp371

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  "I wrote ths talk 4 a high skool. I nevr actually gave it, b/c the skool authorities vetoed the plan 2 invite me" http://bit.ly/gOp371

  favorite twitter sort

• 

  Susan McCarthy

  "I wrote ths talk 4 a high skool. I nevr actually gave it, b/c the skool authorities vetoed the plan 2 invite me" http://bit.ly/gOp371
  – Dean Shareski (shareski) http://twitter.com/shareski/status/50768801989529600

  via:packrati.us

• 03 Feb 11
  

  Jeff Brunstrum

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• 09 Jan 11
  

  invinv
  • In fact 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.
  • But while in some fields the papers are unintelligible because they're full of hard ideas, in others they're deliberately written in an obscure way to seem as if they're saying something important. This may seem a  scandalous proposition, but it has been experimentally verified, in the famous Social Text affair. Suspecting that the papers published by literary theorists were often just intellectual-sounding nonsense, a physicist deliberately wrote a paper full of intellectual-sounding nonsense, and submitted it to a literary theory journal, which published it.
• 20 Nov 10
  

  shanerasnak

  career philosophy

• 22 Sep 10
  

  Hung Doan
  • They want to know what sort of person you are, and this question is just to get you talking.
  • I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were.
  • What you  need to do is discover what you like.
  • the theme of which is: don't give up on your dreams.
  • And most biographies only  exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude  biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius
  • 
    
    The best protection is always to be working on hard problems.
  • In practice, "stay upwind" reduces to "work on hard problems."
  • 
    Most people like to be good at what they do.
  • 
    If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job
  • It means not being defined by it
  • that they wasted so much time.
  • You may be thinking, we have to do more than get good grades. We have to have extracurricular activities
  • What I mean by getting something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to  draw the human face from life.
  • At most colleges, it's not the professors who decide whether you get in, but admissions officers, and they are nowhere near as smart.
  • Obviously the world sucked, so why bother?
  • 
    Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience
  • The best plan, I think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. Don't just do what  they tell you, and don't just refuse to.
  • But in ambitious adults, instead of drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep.
  • 
    One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline.
  • They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in.
  • I'm often  reluctant to go running, but once I do, I enjoy it
  • I feel ill. It's the same with people who  do great things. They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working.
  • But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.
  • 
    If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity  about a promising question.
  • 
    The great mathematician G. H. Hardy said he didn't like math in  high school either. He only took it up because he was better at it than the other students. Only later did he realize math was interesting-- only later did he start to ask questions instead of merely answering them correctly.
  • Work toward finding one.
  • Great questions don't appear suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes them congeal is experience.
  • but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roos
  • Just pick a project that seems interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something, or to answer some question
  • Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially  at first
  • If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes  self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This could take years.)
  • . One of the most powerful is the desire to be better than other people at something.
  • Another powerful motivator is the desire to do, or know, things you're not supposed to.
  • 
    Beware of bad models
  • And in fact I found my stories pretty boring;  what excited me was the idea of writing serious, intellectual stuff like the famous writers.
    
  • 
    Now I have enough experience to realize that those famous writers actually sucked.
  • I should have been less worried about doing something that seemed cool,
  • and just done something I liked.
  • 
    A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is  to find good books.
  • 
    The only real difference between adults and high school kids is that adults realize they need to get things done, and high school kids don't.

  38 more annotations...

• 16 Sep 10
  

  drankan
  • 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.
  • Stay upwind.
• 17 Aug 10
  

  pilsna ___

  (I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.)
  
  When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious. What will you say to high school students? So I asked them, what do you wish someone had told you in high school? Their answers were remarkably similar. So I'm going to tell you what we all wish someone had told us.

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• 07 Feb 10
  

  endolith -

  To a newly arrived undergraduate, all university departments look much the same. The professors all seem forbiddingly intellectual and publish papers unintelligible to outsiders. But while in some fields the papers are unintelligible because they're full

  delicious-import

  • To a newly arrived undergraduate, all university departments look much the same. The professors all seem forbiddingly intellectual and publish papers unintelligible to outsiders. But while in some fields the papers are unintelligible because they're full of hard ideas, in others they're deliberately written in an obscure way to seem as if they're saying something important.
• 10 Nov 09
  

  Paul Welsh

  from sahil

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• 03 Nov 09
  

  Seb Paquet

  Maybe you can be the first generation whose greatest regret from high school isn't how much time you wasted.

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  • If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. 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.
    
    It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but it turns out to be hard, partly because it's hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs. Being a doctor is not the way it's portrayed on TV. Fortunately you can also watch real doctors, by volunteering in hospitals. [1]
    
    But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them 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.
  • 
    What they really mean is, don't get demoralized.
  • People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only  exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude  biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius.
  • We need to cut the Standard Graduation Speech down to, "what someone else with your abilities can do, you can do; and don't underestimate your abilities." But as so often happens, the closer you get to the truth, the messier your sentence gets. We've taken a nice,  neat (but wrong) slogan, and churned it up like a mud puddle. It doesn't make a very good speech anymore. But worse still, it doesn't tell you what to do anymore. Someone with your abilities? What  are your abilities?
  • In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there?  I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.
    
    It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.
  • The best protection is always to be working on hard problems.  Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't.  Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be  able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense.
    
    Well, this seems a grim view of the world, you may think. What I'm telling you is that you should worry? Yes, but it's not as bad as it sounds. It's exhilarating to overcome worries. You don't see faces much happier than people winning gold medals. And you know why they're so happy? Relief.
  • If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job. I don't mean that I'd slack in school. Working at something as a day job doesn't mean doing it badly. It means not being defined by it. I mean I wouldn't think of myself as a high school student, just as a musician with a day job as a waiter doesn't think of  himself as a waiter. [3] And when I wasn't working at my day job I'd start trying to do real work.
  • I'm not saying you shouldn't hang out with your friends-- that you should all become humorless little robots who do nothing but work. Hanging out with friends is like chocolate cake. You enjoy it more if you eat it occasionally than if you eat nothing but chocolate  cake for every meal. No matter how much you like chocolate cake, you'll be pretty queasy after the third meal of it. And that's  what the malaise one feels in high school is: mental queasiness.
  • Collecting donations for a charity is an admirable thing to do, but it's not hard. It's not getting something done. What I mean by getting something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to  draw the human face from life. This sort of thing rarely translates into a line item on a college application.
  • Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do. The best plan, I think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. Don't just do what  they tell you, and don't just refuse to. Instead treat school as a day job. As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet. You're done at 3 o'clock, and you can even work on your own stuff while you're there.
  • Kids are curious, but the curiosity I mean has a different shape from kid curiosity. Kid curiosity is broad and shallow; they ask why at random about everything. In most adults this curiosity dries up entirely. It has to: you can't get anything done if you're always asking why about everything. But in ambitious adults, instead of drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep. The mud flat morphs into a well.
  • Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in. One still hasn't sent out his half of the thank-you notes from his wedding, four years ago. Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox.
    
    I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You  probably need about the amount you need to go running. I'm often  reluctant to go running, but once I do, I enjoy it. And if I don't  run for several days, I feel ill. It's the same with people who  do great things. They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.
  • If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity  about a promising question. The critical moment for Einstein was when he looked at Maxwell's equations and said, what the hell is going on here?
    
    It can take years to zero in on a productive question, because it can take years to figure out what a subject is really about. To take an extreme example, consider math. Most people think they hate math, but the boring stuff you do in school under the name "mathematics" is not at all like what mathematicians do.
  • And not only in intellectual matters. Henry Ford's great question  was, why do cars have to be a luxury item? What would happen if you treated them as a commodity? Franz Beckenbauer's was, in effect, why does everyone have to stay in his position? Why can't defenders score goals too?
  • The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost. Einstein, Ford, and Beckenbauer all used this recipe. They all knew their work like a piano player knows the keys. So  when something seemed amiss to them, they had the confidence to notice it.
  • it's by doing that you  learn.
  • Don't disregard unseemly motivations. One of the most powerful is the desire to be better than other people at something. Hardy said that's what got him started, and I think the only unusual thing  about him is that he admitted it. Another powerful motivator is the desire to do, or know, things you're not supposed to. Closely related is the desire to do something audacious. Sixteen year olds aren't supposed to write novels. So if you try, anything you achieve is on the plus side of the ledger; if you fail utterly, you're doing no worse than expectations. [8]
  • Your life doesn't have to be shaped by admissions officers. It  could be shaped by your own curiosity. It is for all ambitious  adults. And you don't have to wait to start. In fact, you don't  have to wait to be an adult. There's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age.
  • The only real difference between adults and high school kids is that adults realize they need to get things done, and high school kids don't. That realization hits most people around 23. But I'm letting you in on the secret early. So get to work. Maybe you can be the first generation whose greatest regret from high school isn't how much time you wasted.
  • The key to wasting time is distraction. Without distractions it's too obvious to your brain that you're not doing anything with it, and you start to feel uncomfortable. If you want to measure  how dependent you've become on distractions, try this experiment: set aside a chunk of time on a weekend and sit alone and think. You can have a notebook to write your thoughts down in, but nothing else: no friends, TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, books,  newspapers, or magazines. Within an hour most people will feel a  strong craving for distraction.
    

  18 more annotations...

• 10 Mar 09
  

  Jay Luker

  Jamie should read this

  for:jjzach education wisdom highschool paulgraham

• 06 Mar 09
  

  paulo michael

  tips philosophy

• 15 Feb 09
  

  casey mayfield

  Seniors

• 29 Nov 08
  

  John Mark
• 

  James Stuart

  toread

• 26 Nov 08
  

  Paul Bogush

  school

• 11 Sep 08
  

  Alex Shore
  • 
    Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn't have an engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places  to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for "don't give  up on your dreams." Stay upwind.
  • When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they nearly all say the same thing: that they wasted so much time. If you're wondering what you're doing now that you'll regret most later, that's probably it. [4]
  • The word "aptitude" is misleading, because it implies something innate. The most powerful sort of aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests are often acquired tastes.
  • One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no  self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything,  not even a cup of coffee.
  • But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.
  • If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity  about a promising question.
  • It can take years to zero in on a productive question, because it can take years to figure out what a subject is really about.
  • That's what you need to do: find a question that makes the world interesting.
  • f it takes years to articulate great questions, what do you do now, at sixteen? Work toward finding one. Great questions don't appear suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes them congeal is experience.
  • but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost.

  8 more annotations...

• 22 Jul 08
  

  highschool speech advice

• 15 Jul 08
  

  devinhanrahan

  Advice Life

• 12 Jul 08
  

  pamdel

  lifehacks inspiration

• 18 Jun 08
  

  J G

  yp-advice

Page Comments

• 
  Bren on 2006-08-03
  From Paul Graham (of Hackers and Painters)
• 
  Alex Ko on 2006-11-18
  "The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn."

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