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03 May 09

What You'll Wish You'd Known

www.paulgraham.com/hs.html - Preview

education Entrepreneurship speech

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.
18 more annotations...
- 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.

05 Nov 08

Transcript: 'This is your victory,' says Obama - CNN.com

edition.cnn.com/...obama.transcript - Preview

transcript President speech

YouTube - President-Elect Barack Obama in Chicago

www.youtube.com/watch - Preview

President victory speech

09 Oct 08

PowerTalk - automatic speech for PowerPoint presentations

fullmeasure.co.uk/powertalk - Preview

speech ppt powerpoint audio

20 Jan 08

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

news-service.stanford.edu/...jobs-061505.html - Preview

apple inspiration speech

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

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Joel Liu's Library tagged speech → View Popular

What You'll Wish You'd Known

Transcript: 'This is your victory,' says Obama - CNN.com

YouTube - President-Elect Barack Obama in Chicago

PowerTalk - automatic speech for PowerPoint presentations

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

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