Let me start by saying that I goddamn love your writing. All of it. The content and the style are both compelling. I wish I could steal that style and go gain readers with it, but alas, I fail at writing without compelling motive.
As for your academic criticisms, I feel compelled to make a comment. I mean, a student reading your work cannot simply ignore these posts, they speak against the very thing we destroy our youth working for. And I must say that you… are absolutely correct.
Completely.
I mean, c’mon, look at my writing. There’s just something wrong with it. It is not how I speak, it seems to come from another mind. My spoken words are funny, but my writing takes such a stiff tone. It takes sleep deprivation to relax it. But I digress, the problem goes so much further than that. School is perhaps the most sophisticated trap I have ever seen. And so many others are truly falling for it. “I have to do this,” they say. “This is necessary for a good life.” These people saying such things absolutely hate school. And they spend money they do not have for the privilege of such hatred.
As for me, how I got caught in the trap is quite the anomaly. I graduated
valedictorian of my charter highschool, and was eligible for many scholarships if I attended the University of Arizona. A school right down the street. I gain $4000 worth of “living expenses” per semester. Something that I could easily live on for now (though that ability soon disappear). Not only that, I enjoy school, I do not do it with an end goal in mind, I do it for the sake of doing it. It provides continual new, surprising content to devour at a pace that suits me. I get straight A’s and the process repeats itself. Even so, though, there is a thought that nags at me: “You’re wasting your time.”
Though enjoying school, that does not stop it from being a time sink. I tried to get around this feeling, I am gaining computer engineering education, hoping I can make use of it in various forms when I leave college. I am also trying to improve my social and communication skills, as well. Creating social networks or some such. But still, I am unimpressed with school’s so-called necessity, and that time sink feeling remains. As I came upon your blog and read its contents, and then read the disruption literature (including Disrupting Class), and then the Blue Ocean books; I believe I can properly put into words my disappointment.
(Note: my understanding of all the books that I read is probably incomplete, I would appreciate it if you corrected my stupidity.)
Human beings are a disruptive technology, and mostly everything treats them as a future sustaining technology. Perhaps I am being ridiculous, but it is a thought that I feel makes sense. I, a straight A student, have accomplished nothing of value yet in my life. Nothing worth buying, reading, analyzing… nothing. I am told I have great potential, I am put on the Dean’s List, and the pump many thousands of dollars of investment in me for my future worth. They do not see what I can manage to create of value now, they do not consider me worth anything now.
This is how everyone in school is treated. The “potential” writers are not told to see if they can find success in writing outside the school, to learn to live off their writing, they are just “corrected” by an audience of one who gives a subjective value of the student’s writing. The “potential” artists are not told to find a livable use of their creation somewhere outside school. Am I crazy in thinking that they should be told this? That expectations should go beyond simply satisfying one person with that one project?
It does not help that I hear from many sources that most of the learning takes place after school. Sometimes or most times, there’s some reeducation going on.
Clearly, during the fastest learning periods, people are not learning many
valuable skills that they could be. And the vast majority of people only put up with it because they “have to”, because they “can’t get anywhere without the prestige of a degree.”
There really is something wrong with school. But people, being so brainwashed that they need it, put up with it.
Anyways, forgive me for my long ramble telling you about my cowardly self and how I willfully stay within academia. Also forgive my bad English; I have been told that the majority of us native speakers can’t speak our own language. I hope you find riches, man, you deserve it.
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When someone gives me an email like this, one that is personal and passionate about their lives, I am at a loss at how to respond. I’ve had this email for many days, and I have been struggling at how to respond. Any reply seems inadequate.
So how about a movie? Your scenario is best addressed by Steve Jobs in his Standford Graduation Speech. Everyone should listen to it. It will change your life.
Find what you love, what you are passionate about, and go for it. Whatever you do, don’t live life according to other people’s desires. Live for your own desires, your own passions. Your degree is a great fallback position. The generation from the Great Depression was so desirous of their children to get degrees because during the Depression, people with a degree could get work.
What I find interesting is that most people spend their lives doing something very different from their degree and very different than what they thought they would be in college.
I agree with the thought that it is more important what character you become rather than what profession. I’d rather be a poor fireman than an investor doing crooked things. But the option is out there to be an investor doing good things.
Education in America (assuming that is where you are from but this likely is about education everywhere) is about educating you to become an employee. It is like education is a giant factory where we are being manufactured to make other people rich. Any whiff of the entrepreneur spirit on you in a business, and you will be fired almost on the spot. This has always been peculiar to me as if you are looking for another job, isn’t the problem the exact same to the employer? But an employee jumping to become employee of another company isn’t really improving his situation even if he is improving his income. As long as you remain an employee, they don’t care where you go.
Take the American income tax. Note how there is no tax on wealth itself. But the income tax is hitting those who are trying to become wealthy. People who are wealthy do not get their money through an income. All the U.S. Senators, well most of them, did not get their money through a job. Job, in their language, stands for ‘Just Over Broke’.
If people really wanted to help others, they would encourage, or at least allow, some sort of entrepreneurial and investment education in the school system. Not everyone would go such a way, but the fact that they don’t want to give anyone the choice is very telling. The way how they go after trying to remove the S type of corporation (which is what small businesses use) is also telling. It was cruel, during the Industrial Revolution, to not teach reading to a child. During the Silicon Revolution, is it any less cruel to not teach people about accounting, investing, and entrepreneurship?
The real reason to learn money and all is to have greater control over your life. You can follow all the ‘rules’ of life and get screwed. Think of all the millions of people who have been laid off. They didn’t do anything wrong. But they are employees and so they have no control over their fate. All they know is to get another job. Imagine if you are 40+ and you get laid off. You can’t exactly start over again. Now imagine if you have a wife and children to support. Now imagine that wife getting a divorce and walking out on you over a decade of marriage because you’ve lost your job. Many guys in this situation I know have resolved the matter simply by putting the gun to their head and pulling the trigger. That is a dire situation.
But I have no idea of what to say to you because I do not know what to say to myself. My entire purpose of myself making this site is not to act like a business expert or anything but to learn about business so I can have full control over my life. But you shouldn’t give up so soon.
Find what you love. Everything else is just noise.
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