Well put!
This is something _so many_ college kids don't seem to understand. I had many friends who graduated then just stood around looking for where to go next. It hadn't come up in discussions but it became apparent they were surprised by the sudden end to the "tracks" while the students who saw them coming (or were told better/more often) all were befuddled, "How did you not see this coming?", "Did you expect someone to just walk up and offer you a job?", "You have never even interned in your field??".
I don't blame the kids, they don't know any better. They've spent their whole life focusing on the next goal, I talked about this specifically (in blog post) when I dropped out of college to go full-time into my profession. For me, learning "there are no tracks" and more importantly "you don't need to go to the end of the college track before you decide next steps" was freeing and empowering while also being a bit terrifying.
it's not because they are any more prestigious or important, but because they provide a clear sense of achievement/external validation and kids that make it to the end of college are kids that have had decades of achievement/external validation being their primary measure of success.
and because of that, those places do an amazing job recruiting. i remember toward the end of my undergrad days there was huge sense of competition to get a "teach for america" position, even among folks with no interest in education. it was appealing simply because it was selective and provided a clear framework for 'next steps'.
Graduate school is a mixed bag when it comes to prestige. It's fairly well known that grad student lifestyle is a grind, highly competitive, and a financial sacrifice. You go into it for a love of academics, not as a default next step.
As for prestigious jobs like FAANG: I think you're downplaying the extreme compensation offered by many of these jobs. It's not just about prestige, it's about unlocking a level of wealth that is hard to ignore. It delivers on the dream people have when they imagine a university education unlocking incredible career options.
I guess we all need some amount of scaffolding in our life, at one point or another.
I think it's the other way around: the more prestigious option becomes the track.
I think the absurd compensation helps a bit there too
Main challenge there is you don’t have a plumbing/electrical conglomerate like you have in tech to standardize recruiting.
What I found myself in was a group of very sincere, optimistic, wonderful kids who had no idea how the real world of engineering or advertising or design worked, but were fully persuaded that this $30k/yr education would prepare them for it and hand them the next waypoint on their life path (while also allowing them creative freedom to experiment in ways that they wouldn't be able to later, in the corporate world). I dropped out after 3 semesters because it was pointless, although in the last semester I jumped ahead from Typography 2 to 5, and skipped a bunch of other stuff. I had poached a lot of clients from my former agency, which had folded.
Since then, my life has had no rails whatsoever. I'm good at what I do and I go where I want and choose who I work for, and the world essentially rewards me for being good at figuring things out.
All of this comes down to a lack of imagination, and parents (like my father) trying to instill a sense in their children that one must pursue certain predefined paths to be successful. But completing a predefined quest doesn't make us more valuable; in fact, it makes us interchangeable. Being a difficult, unique, tough, anal obsessive prick at what you do is hard to ever replace with a formal education. And experience is king. So start early and ignore all the tracks you can.
In my opinion, there are TOO MANY tracks.
We have plastered the entire map with so many tracks, that experiencing true freedom has become virtually impossible.
And then there was the other kind. It's not like we didn't enjoy our college days or go out to party more than we should. It's not like we studied extra. It was just this one guy in our friend group that did what he did, we saw what he did and got the message it was time and anything after that would be unnecessarily risking it.
No, they spent their whole lives being sheltered. Let's call it what it is. These people were on tracks because they were put on tracks from a young age and told that the track leads somewhere, and any questioning of the tracks was often met with a harsh rebuke. They didn't play outside with the neighborhood kids, they were at soccer practice. They didn't get a summer job at a shitty fast food joint, they were doing summer school or learning piano. Everything they've done from start to finish has been curated. Of course when the track ends abruptly it's catastrophic.
Independence, curiosity, and self-quesitoning and awareness are often not taught because "getting ahead" is more important.
From my observations, having low parental involvement and excessively unstructured upbringing doesn't automatically produce determined and self-directed adults. From my familiarity with several small towns, I would actually say it does the opposite. I can think of many people I knew as a kid who ended up stuck in small towns at dead-end jobs simply because inertia was the only thing they knew. Nobody ever jumped into their lives to push them to try different things or explore paths that weren't sitting right in front of them.
It's not clear to me how the "tracks" were significantly different in, say, the past 80 years, at least in America. Compulsory schooling has been a thing for a long time. Getting an after school job delivering newspapers so you have a little spending money is not exactly a clever endeavor, and it's not clear to me you learn more life skills than you do having to manage homework (for example).
Get married to someone of the opposite gender, go to church every sunday, have kids. Work a job with a pension for 30 years, retire with a gold watch. (or the blue collar equivalent). Those are tracks.
I don't disagree with the premise that kids are more coddled today than they used to be, but the "tracks" metaphor is, if anything, less valid now than ever. There is more choice, and less stability, as far as I can tell.
Imagine not being able to get a shitty fast food job because you are disabled. Or just moved to the US and speak too weird and don't have anyone to vouch for you.
Ditto for hanging out with the neighborhood kids. This assumes that you are one of them, and not a victim/target for them.
My assumption was that this would NOT be the case in the USA. You hear about kids dropping out and starting startups, or people just skipping college to work on what they like, or kids joining trade schools to get into welding.
Isn't this the norm in the USA / most of the developed world ?? Your comment confirms the same thing.. you dropped out..That's all I read and see everywhere about America, that you are free to take decisions like this (and often encouraged)
It feels odd to think to that kids in the USA are on a somewhat fixed train track, when there are so many opportunities + freedom + less judgement overall in the society.
This is not to say that dropouts without that kind of success aren’t happy. I do believe that America does afford a lot of leeway for people to be happy and comfortable in non-traditional life paths. They’re just not the ones being discussed din this comment.
College is expensive, but it's nowhere near as expensive as the high private university tuitions you read about ($200K+). Most people have access to state universities that are much cheaper. Even at private universities most students are on sliding scale payments with scholarships. It's common for 10-20% or more of a university's students to be paying effectively $0 tuition.
While you definitely can skip college and still have a good career, the trades never really pay as well as internet lore suggests and the number of people who start startups and succeed is very small.
The year after that I stumbled upon a new job which paid more than their highest value of N. They definitely don't want this to happen. They want you striving for (N+1)+1 only, so they can give it out whenever they think you feel like you're not progressing, and keep you in their system.
> "You have never even interned in your field??".
The article is for people who don't have a field. In some circles, this is not a concept people speak about, but I think it represents many or most people who graduate university (in the US at least). The specialized fields like doctor, lawyer, engineer etc you hear about represent a minority of students and jobs. Many or most graduates end up in some variant of the fidelity customer service job.
The world is filled with office buildings, and generic office jobs. You need a college degree to get them, and no special skills.
It's hard to start a business with minimal life experience. All the more so a startup kind of business. There are lots of things to look for, to pay attention to - that you were carefully (?, more like randomly) sheltered from until then.
By the time most kids get out they're institutionalized and don't even know what they want.
Blame parents, teachers etc. When I mean blame, really blame them unapologetically, I have no sympathies for them.
Now I'm 25, make my yearly call again. I say Dad, "Now what?" He says, "I don't know, get married."
Chilling by the watercooler, being paid for 8 hours a day with health insurance etc. while working 2 hours a day and/or bitching about your job. Or just enjoying life after work.
These people would be as much at home in Soviet Russia as they would in today’s USA. They want more security. The EU has become the new USSR for this. Lots of protections.
It’s what people want. They don’t actually want the AI disruption. But it’s coming because their employers don’t care what they want.
However if you claim to love capitalism and hate socialism, or whatever, then get a taste of it. Go hunting in the market for clients. Go spar and learn sales skills. Build your own company and service your own clients.
Or let the employer do it for you. But then you are just like a renter, not an owner — except on the supply side of the economy. And they may rent your time… for now.
The “American Dream” btw has become about renting money from banks — to finish college, to pay the mortgage on that house, etc. But the cost of all of it has gone up much more than your grandparents. It is just indentured servitude with a choice of landlords. At the end of the day, they want you to rent the money from banks to create demand for the money, so you can work for 30 years and pay it off. But the AI will break even that social contract.
Jobs will be going down
Entrepreurship will be going up
Find your people. And in the sense of getting a team of loyal badasses together. Build something new. Use AI. Don’t let your employer tell you how to use AI or use it to replace you.
> Find the interesting people.
Note that this isn't advice for everyone. Go back to earlier in the piece:
> But in the middle, there's a group who wish they had ambitious plans, but don't. This speech is for you. I'm going to tell you how to get ambitious plans.
The "Find Your People" of the title is the more general advice, for a larger audience.
Your people might well be a quiet small town environment that's doing OK economically, has good school(s) for children, people are neighborly and supportive, not a lot of inequity and all that follows, etc.
You might not think of that as interesting, at least not in the abstract, but it might be your people.
For myself, who seems to be a natural startup person (maybe including a little bit of both Swartz and Altman), I've been thinking that I'm most likely to find a concentration of my people in a town with a good liberal arts college, intermixed with economically OK non-college people, and easily accessible to a major metro area -- without feeling cut off too much from activity and opportunity, and with having a regular infusion of a little freshness/change.
(I'm not convinced that Cambridge/Boston, San Francisco, or NYC can be that place, long-term, unless you have enough money to insulate yourself from the VHCOLA downsides. And then maybe you end up mostly only associating with people who also have enough money to be sufficiently insulated, which isn't the complete breakfast.)
When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life.
Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
Read Plato's "Apology," "Crito," and "Phaedo." Yes, in that order.
https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html
https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/crito.html
https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedo.html
If you know nothing of these dialogs, that's almost better.
I know that some internet rando telling you to read a bunch of Plato is, like, never going to happen.
But on the off chance that you do, the less I tell you, the better. And if you do decide to do this, you can cheat and read along with the sparknotes and use an LLM to help read along too. But do try your best to read it first, then use the other resources to guide you. It'll make more sense after you read them. Again sorry, about this being really strange.
But it is worth your time and effort, I promise you.
You must take those risks. And if you fail, they will be no-one for you. We try to hide this to teens because it’s a raw deal, but generations before us were sent to war without much thought either.
You must succeed at life above the others, or there will be no family thing. At each generation, 30% of males don’t reproduce at all, and there is no plaque for them, no memorial, people simply won’t talk about you.
Do a startup and do not fail, you do not have a real choice here.
This is a great paragraph:
> If you want to, you can just decide to shift gears at this point, and no one's going to tell you you can't. You can just decide to be more curious, or more responsible, or more energetic, and no one's going to go look up your college grades and say, "Hey, wait a minute, this person's supposed to be a slacker."
I've often seen people get too attached to an unproductive "identity" instead of looking at things as they are. It's way too common for people to fail once and think they're a failure, rather than thinking that they just failed at that particular time.
By the way, I remember meeting you during the S23 batch and how genuinely excited you were to meet us, young founders who were just getting started. It does seem like you found your people!
My first job after finishing college was in a factory. After many more years of drifting, I finally had the dumb luck to start encountering people doing intellectually engaging things and actually making good money.
When I started surrounding myself with those individuals, I started realizing I was underselling my capabilities. And I started having higher expectations of what I wanted to achieve in specific domains.
I am definitely not successful by the standards of the corporate world, but I've superseded what my prospects should have been based on my track record in my 20's. And almost all of that started by rubbing shoulders with people in stages of life that I never considered before.
This is one of those sentences that make me jealous I didn’t write it. Just such a perfect description of early adulthood for many.
Not having something real and tangible to care about can be devastating.
Lots of people who learn to do this cause lots of chaos and destruction in their wake. I don't care if you need this attitude to be a founder, it still sucks.
I worked at a startup where the technical founder had this attitude and was, at least with respect to the product at hand, totally incompetent and it was truly catastrophically absurd and stressful and a huge waste of tons of people's time and money.
At the same time, lots of people who do this end up being extremely successful.
The difficulty is knowing which rejection and criticism to ignore. Imagine losing out on a multi-billion dollar business because your initial pitch was dismissed by people saying your business is pointless and redundant because rsync already exists[0].
On the flip side, there's a lot of founders who... have more determination than experience, let's say, and when told their idea won't work, instead of using factual data points (or getting an MVP out to collect data points) operate purely on belief until they run out of money.
At making money, likely true. Leaving a trail of destruction in your wake is just not my idea of success.
There is a reason you see lots of asshole business owners and not many doormats, though - you need to filter criticism or it will always screw you up in the end. Accepting criticism can help you course-correct and produce better/happier, but isn't a requirement for success.
I've never envied the people who graduate college and then immediately go to work at big tech companies where they start off as an "SDE 1", then "SDE 2", then Mid level, senior, staff, principal, etc. There's definitely more security and stability in that, but I think these people are also missing out on a lot.
Not in terms of financial reward of course. But in terms of rewarding career off the beaten path.
Personally while I want to do a startup I am finding the boring path you mention quite fascinating!
"Find your people" is presented as finding those who can unlock you, show new worlds and opportunities. It can sound like the wonderful promise of networking bringing you opportunities (like a land of milk and honey).
But at the same time, you're told you must tolerate rejection and disbelief.
So perhaps the key is first to find something you believe in enough to stake a claim to it. Then some people will reject you (and leave), but you'll find others who buy in. Then you'll have the terrifying responsibility of making it true, for yourself and for them, and your (mutual) commitment becomes, well, serious.
Are they "your" people? Are you leading them, or following what you've targeted? When you need to pivot, are they following you, or are you all following the moving target?
It's complicated, but there's a phase/governance shift from interaction to trusting and being trusted that makes the entire dance possible.
It's your reliability in your commitment that leads them to trust your vision and direction, and willingly fill your many gaps and blind spots.
So I wouldn't mis-read "find your people" as "suck up to those handing out opportunities you want". It's not just getting off the tracks, but setting your own direction - reliably - that might secure other's trust.
I remember talking as college seniors about how: for two decades there’s always been some near-future end-of-school-term date that we’re all marching together toward, and isn’t it so strange that the whole cycle is about to disappear?
if next_end_date.nil?
# ?!? FIXME
end
Of course it’s somewhat possible to join new calendar cycles. A two-week engineering sprint. Even YC’s batch concept recreates this for a few months, to great effect! But not the same.
But for the most part, when the calendar rhythm is no longer the source of medium-term stability and inspiration and motivation, I think this makes a good point that the people you surround yourself with can be. If not, what else?
Thank you, Jessica.
> When we started Y Combinator, everyone treated it as a joke. We were funding kids right out of college and only giving them small amounts of money. How could these startups ever succeed? Now everyone knows it's a good idea to fund young founders, but twenty years ago, it just seemed lame. But we didn't care what people thought of us. We knew we were onto something. In fact it was good that we seemed lame, because that meant it took several years before people started to copy us.
And it’s still the same excitement every day 5, 10, etc. years later.
I suppose I’m saying is that when you find it, you know.
Guess what, after years of meandering (YC, Series A, big tech) I still come back to the moment I first discovered your book.
Also, please tell PG, I knew about your book before I knew what YC was :-)
You really do need to treat your friends as a revolving/evolving Rolodex.
Get rid of “friends”/people who hold you back. Their problems are not your problems. You have your own goal in life. They can deal with their own problems, and maturity is realizing it’s up to the individual to change.
Get friends in your life who add value to your life. These will be hard to find, but once you have such friends they are friends for life. These are people who are riding the same wave as you, who yearn for better waves. They love the sport of life.
I don’t talk to anyone I went to college with because I realized they’re not on the same wavelength. I’m not interested in cruising through life. They didn’t really add value to my life, and I didn’t want to be bored or annoyed. I’m talking nihilistic people who are ok with just status quo. Yuck!
The friends I’ve made since have improved my life. They’ve shown me how to really make the most out of life. Challenging myself to be better, and they’re smarter than me which is encouraging as well.
I have maybe a dozen close friends. I’m glad that I’m one of their close friends too.
Sorry if I sounded harsh ESL btw.
People choose to fall in some doom loops or waste their time doing anything but making connections. That’s their problem.
For everyone else, there’s work, meetup/luma, discords, and so on to connect.
Truth is nowadays it’s really about networking however messed up that might be. Inherently that’s pretty luck based but it’s a near guarantee to bring you _something_ as long as you don’t give up.
I moved in with my parents and I'm grateful for that. But they were not helpful in any way with helping me think through what was next for me. As I've said here before, it was a long road of mental health and drinking challenges and I finally got it together enough to have a direction somewhere.
As I reread this, I recognize how whiny this privileged white girl (!!!) sounds. But I also know that my not-so-great experiences got me where I am and I desperately want more for my grandkids and hope that I can be what they need me to be for them.
She lost me at that statement. I hate these kind of reductive statements that are presented as a thoughtful statement. There are vastly more than three groups in that audience (granted, it is self-selected elite University, so the number of groups is still constrained comparatively).
What are the vast number of groups outside of that set? Of course there's "have ambitious plans, don't want ambitious plans", which would probably be more interesting than the other three, but what are the other missing groups?
For the rest of us, especially here at HN, it would have been interesting to learn a bit more about how she got to that Fidelity job first and how she then "drifted" towards "her people", namely the startup people, and then the book and Y Combinator in specific. Some Y combinator early anecdotes would have been great, too.
For example, startups were one of the most canonical examples of going off the rails. Yet now, many people equate doing a startup with (1) apply to YC, (2) raise a round from a prestigious VC, and other rail-like things. Some even go down these tracks with no firm idea of what they want their company to be, hoping that the train tracks will reveal it to them.
Since the VC game relies on volume, it is natural for tracks like YC to have emerged.
https://apnews.com/article/kermit-frog-university-of-marylan... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44075293)
The community you're most aligned with, that you rush into hoping to feel as if you fit in, it might be more like an angler fish just waiting for you to jump into its jaws.
I think the characterization of a community as an angler fish has some merit but might be a little pessimistic. In any case, it's way better than interacting with people who you know are definitely not your community.
Worked great. Would ride again. 10/10.
> That which does not kill you, makes you stronger.
- Freddy Nietzsche
> Or leaves you weak and exhausted.
- Bill Prekker's Corollary
I mixed with a lot of very ambitious people at university, some had a clear plan of how to exercise their ambition, not all of those plans worked as intended, many had ambition with no specific plan at that time other than to learn a breadth of useful knowledge, make good connections, take on early work with great networking potential .. and then pivot when they had a better handle on the world as it was at that time a year or three after graduation.
Ambition to succeed doesn't have to come with a specific predetermined path on how to succeed .. there's still room to adapt and morph as one moves forward.
Rarely can you “find your people” without letting other people go.
The unspoken truth in this article is that it’s just as important to be willing to let go of relationships that aren’t helping you grow.
Easier said than done.
Whether it’s the negative influence of a toxic friend, or the mediocre advice of an overbearing parent (who is just trying to keep you on the rails), other people rarely have your best interests in mind.
Losing the people who aren’t “your people” is (usually) a necessary step to finding the right people.
https://www.youtube.com/live/hLFa8zGeotI?feature=shared&t=74...
Do NOT "fake it until you make it". Be yourself. And find people who accept you as you are.
Colloquially when people use the term "fake it till you make it" they don't really mean "pretend to be a different person". They just mean act in the face of uncertainty. You can do it with or without undeserved confidence, it's besides.
For what it's worth, I teach my students not to listen to their parents, because while most parents want the best for their children, without doubt, their assumptions are typically outdated, and were probably already wrong when they were young.
Hopefully what you mean is something like you teach them to think critically about their parents advice as one input among many, understanding where the advice comes from and its inherent strengths and flaws.
One bit though I'm interested in chatting about:
> The truth is there are thousands of different places you could go work, and you have to consider them all and figure out which is the best. But that sounds impossible, right? You only had to choose between 60 different majors, and now you have to choose between thousands of different jobs? How do you even do that? The first step, is to acknowledge that you have to.
Do you really "have" to? I guess we can relatively safely assume that basically 99% of those graduates have essentially the same life goals in terms of financial stability, retirement, etc. Lately though I've wondered about the basically unspoken premise we pitch to our kids from the get-go. I recently found a diary entry from me when I was 7 years old that had a line along the lines of, "I finally figured out what I'm gonna be when I grow up!" I noticed also that so frequently one of the first questions asked at parties or meetups is, "So what do you do for a living?" We really seem to be telling eachother that you go to school and then you do a career and that's how you define yourself, mostly. Differentiate based on hobbies you get to brag about during a "and tell us one interesting fact about yourself" portion of an icebreaker.
I have a friend here that teaches English about 15 hours a week. The rest of his time he spends painting murals on the riverside (unenforced here in Taiwan, graffiti is kinda just considered public art) or drawing people he sees on trains. I asked him why he doesn't take up more hours, he replied that actually he'd work less if he could, but he needs to hit a certain minimum annual income in order to be eligible for permanent residency. Once he gets that, he'll work even less. He's one of the happiest people I know.
I've been wondering if one of the responses to late stage capitalism will be more en-masse opt-outs. There's a recognized class of this in the PRC, called "Lying Flat People," or "Full Time Children," or my favorite, "Rat People." They scrounge together enough cash for a street BBQ and beers, and then spend their day just lounging, drinking, smoking, and bbqing. In Taiwan we have "Moonlight Tribe," people who spend all their money the second they get their paycheck and then live penny to penny until the end of the month. I'm guessing other countries have similar movements - I remember meeting vagabonds (their self-description) in New Orleans that were happily living a "post-capitalism" life.
It's maybe short-sighted since it basically guarantees you will die younger than most, but then again none of us are guaranteed to make it to retirement anyway so I can also respect the choice.
There are definitely healthy middle grounds available as life choices.
edit: Despite now making 5x my first salary, I still feel my situation; less than Serfdom. For the same outcome... there are easier/more rewarding paths.
Under this light, with capital for a house I'll never afford sitting in the bank, less-than-mainstream options start to look more appealing. To borrow a term I've learned in this supposedly-fanciful Up-or-Out corporate life: my 'blockers' are legality/morality and... I wasn't born in [or relocated to/kept in] the right ZIP code.
The irony is that my parents were immigrant entrepreneurs and my grandparents were also entrepreneurs on both sides. Yet my parents pushed me towards medical school or a stable job at the least.
I think this was for a couple reasons:
1. Asian parents express their insecurities through their children. They wanted a stable and high income (which maps to "doctor") so they push their kids to become the version of them they never were.
2. Asian parents treat their children like status symbols. Nothing says "I am the best parent" than being able to say "my son/daughter is a doctor." Saying 'my son/daughter owns their own business" just does not have the same ring to it.
In asian cultures, status and conformity are very valuable, and those do not map to high agency.
But having parents that are not involved enough to push their kids towards anything in particular is a much bigger challenge to over come.
If you have a degree from a prestigious university and the network that comes along with it, pivoting towards start ups or something more creative or entrepreneurial is a lot easier than if you never went to college at all or didn't finish high school.
The best thing to give kids is access to a very wide—as wide as they can stomach—orientation of all there is in the world. It's not curation, it's not "the best". it's volume and contrasts.
I debate my friends about private school. they have kids, I don't yet. Private school is actually a narrow lens, is my argument.
I will point out though, anecdotally, my spouse went to the highest tier of public school in our city. She has a good balance of "seeing the world for what it is" while also having an edge of being personally networked to a ton of folks who are rich, well-connected, and capable.
I look at the friend groups I built when I was a kid, and then I look at hers.
- My old friend groups are all stuck in a range of poverty to lower-middle-class.
- My spouses friends are all doing very well for themselves, live all over the world, prestigious careers, active hobbies, highly intellectual, cultured, etc.
It's a stark contrast.
There is something to be said for ensuring your kids go to the best schools possible. Those early networks are pivotal in forming an above average life.
Competency is secondary to connection.
There are many aspects of my low-income schooling I would not want to pass onto a child but there are also aspects of my partner's schooling that I wouldn't want to pass either. I don't really know what the answer is, but I feel like being at either end of the normal distribution of schools here isn't good.
I think this might be more of an American thing tbh. Having early networks can help grease the wheels for an above average life maybe but it's not so straightforward.
Personally, I went to an average public high school, I went to a small university (~9k students), and I'm now one of the top 3% of earners in my country just shy of a decade after graduating
I didn't wind up keeping in touch with anyone I went to any of my schooling with, honestly. I had to move away from my hometown to find opportunities so those bonds faded
It hasn't been easy for sure, it would definitely help to have that embedded network from childhood, but I don't think that is a requirement
Being competent and working hard can get you a long way
Relative school quality (performance on standardized tests, admissions to fancy schools), and public/private are proxies for these more fundamental issues. Too many parents discount the value of (1) to zero, with the idea that they're "sacrificing themselves" "for their kids".
An example of one good reason to not send your kids to private school: Burning yourself out on a series of high-stress job to afford sending your middle-class kid to an upper-class private school will traumatize them. If not for their education/social experience at school, then for your lack of calming and positive influence on their emotional/relationship-forming lives.
I don't think it's necessarily "wrong" for some people to send their kids to a "narrow-lens" school, even if it's often wrong. It can be right for somebody else and wrong for you.
I went to private school and in hindsight it pretty obviously altered my life for the better — I was a smart but lazy kid, and being surrounded by people who were dead-set on going to Harvard, and by teachers who expected excellence, was a huge factor in making me actually try hard.
If I was a smart lazy kid at a school where I had to try to find that environment, rather than being thrust into it, I would have had a much lower trajectory.
When you don't have good people around, you pay the price in time and pain. Those people will save you years and hundreds of thousands - or even millions, simply by showing you the most egregious traps to avoid and the more virtuous behaviours to adopt. They'll make your success more predictable, less reliant on the specifics of your genetic makeup, domestic instability, and odd moments of luck.
I was a good kid. Didn't end up well at all. Figured I could at least try to be a good person to others as time goes on, and pass on the gotchas and virtuous habits I partly figured out myself.
It's hard to find things that all of them have in common. They all come from supportive, functioning families and all of them are artistic people working in technical fields and have high EQ. They are all very curious but not scattered or unfocused.
I didn't know if I should write creative or artistic above because they are so similar. They are different though, right?
This sounds good sure, but what if you give your child a wide orientation and they want to be an influencer, or club promoter, or grind it out in acting? They almost certainly won't want to become an accountant or nurse. Who would want to do that by choice?
But maybe an accountant or nurse is the path to a good life. The extreme is celebrity children which often have issues.
I think its good to have restraints. If you have an infinite bank roll and no real forcing function, you're likely to get lost
You're absolutely right
I wonder how many people graduate from prestigious universities, well connected and set up to succeed, and then don't ever really make anything of themselves
Neither is enough - def need to find ways to expand kids network, especially the network of adults they know.
Your child doesn’t have to attend a school where educational attainment isn’t valued, to understand that perspective exists.
Their “normal” will strongly influence their choices. For example, if you wanted your child to attend college, I would argue the single best way to ensure they do is to enroll them in a high school where 90%+ of the student body later goes on to college.
So its important to "find your people", but as always it's as important to situate advice in the context where the advice-giver issues it from, and in this case Jessica has spent her entire life as an elite, finding other elites in elite circles, and I'm going to hazard a guess that this is probably something that has had a positive impact on her life.
I think your friends are probably on to something, realizing that you're responsible for helping to guide your child as they grow up has a way of crystalizing certain arguments, and various "hypotheticals" fall by the wayside as the attraction of an intellectual experiment and being the devil's advocate just doesn't really have the same pull anymore once it's your own child's future at stake and not just some thought experiment about "volumes and contrasts". As always people are free to make their own choices, and even listen to a speech from someone who was able have almost $200,000 of money spent on their high-school education, a speech about how to plan your career that is big on "gumption" and "stick to it" energy, and surprisingly short on "be born in the top 1% of economic circles", but given that this is a speech at the aforementioned Bucknell, I am pretty sure that most of the crowd is already pretty hip to the realities of the world they're about to enter.
The reality is that the people who control the funding don’t want anything to do with the average slob. “Find your people” is a euphemism for “be rich and well connected, and hang out with other elites”
I’ve heard that it’s kinda like that in the US currently but I’m not actually sure. I went to public school in Canada and it was completely fine.
LOL; thanks this made my chill Friday very chill.
On principle, I don't like feeding into wealth disparity so I don't want to pay for private school. Your perspective is most practical and likely something I'll lean into as I do have kids of my own. "Why not do both" basically.
So, as an older adult, I think maybe we need to be teaching more responsibility to kids today rather than this Disney fantasy. If people just focus on trying to do the best they can, that’s good enough. And spend that extra time improving your home, volunteering, and working on your finances like people did in the mid-to-late 20th century.
When you're young, particularly in tech, taking some swings (like with a startup) and not succeeding isn't a long-term detriment. It's a good experience that can help you land other jobs in the worst case.
Which is to say, not all dream-chasing is created equal. If you want to play music, then you need to do a cost-benefit analysis: you will probably not sustain yourself very long, will probably want a dayjob and/or an out at some point, and this is an opportunity cost vs early career traction. If one's ambition only begins and ends with that, then it won't matter so much if what you end up with is "just a job" with lower income potential. All depends on what you're ok with.
The common anecdote is trying to make the big leagues. But consider another: some elite athletes train for years ahead of the Olympics, and then it's all over and they never do it again (most often). Are they screwed? Well it arguably demonstrates discipline and grit and might look impressive on a resume. The lives of ex-Olympians go on. By the same token, someone who never makes the NBA or whatever can get a scholarship ride anyway (which compared to the cost of lifelong training, might be a small victory).
Sometimes optimizing for the early career/education ladder-jumping isn't the "correct" move. But I think it's important that young people understand what's probably at stake
But if you've spent your whole life being told by the whole world--even people you thought were really interesting and wanted to get to know--that you're "just too fucking weird," it lands more like, "Oh. More advice for other people."
Similarly, if you're a person who likes all kinds of things--but only for 6 weeks to 6 months and then becomes utterly bored of them--there is no stable group of "your people." There's just "these people, for now, I guess," and you hold them lightly because you know in a matter of months, when you don't share the passion for the one thing they're stably obsessed with, you won't have enough in common anymore for them to tolerate you.
I'm almost 40. I'm really at a decision point where I have to decide if I want to keep working on my underlying trauma wounds, in hopes that if I just work hard enough, I'll eventually break into the "fun kind of odd" category instead of "too fucking weird," and blend in enough to have "people," or whether I want to own that this is just how I am, and there's nothing to be done about it, so I should really do what I can to appreciate the fleeting tolerance of "people who don't know me very well yet" while it lasts, but invest most of my energy in trying to figure out if there's any way to be both happy and lonely.
Keep working on your trauma. Don't however think that your healing is a requirement to have friends, love, etc. We are all broken and hurt. We are broken together.
My lord this cuts deep. Bonus points if you approach your interests in a way that nobody else seems to, leaving you feeling even more disconnected and alone when you're around people who share them.
I've been wrestling with this since (dropping out of) high school, I'm in my early 20s now. I lean towards embracing my idiosyncrasies and letting go of attachment towards getting the kind of social fulfillment I want. Ask me on a different day, though, and the siren's call of having a 'people' is too strong to pass up.
I like to think that learning to just be authentic to myself leads to both in the long run - if I can find a way to be okay with being alone, I'll be in a better place to reach out when the time comes. Still working on the first part of that hypothesis though.
Would you be interested in chatting more about this sometime? Shoot me an email, sheyaway at outlook.
I googled study fees for that university. $69000 per year plus expenses for accommodation, food and books.
After you finish such school, you should be top level motivated professional with highly lucrative job lined up. If you drop quarter of million dollars for paper, just to discover at end you need to "reinvent yourself", you are probably highly highly privileged person, or just not so smart.
18 years old kids need to hear this speech. Not students before graduation!
Ms. Livingston graduated around when I did. I can't think of anything that I (or she) did to launch a career, either pre- or post-graduation that would be applicable to someone graduating today. When we graduated, you could actually get an entry level job in an office as a generic English major. You were generally competing with others in your local area or state, not the entire world's best. You could spam a bunch of resumes out and count on a handful of interviews and a few offers. You had at least a little assurance that if you did a good job, you'd advance or job-hop your way to something better. Back then, your student debt was (usually) manageable post-graduation and not a ball and chain holding you back. With a little diligent saving, you had a shot at affording a home and getting on the real estate ladder. And, you could do all these things as a B or C student, without being the world's foremost expert in your field.
I don't think any of these are true anymore. Graduates today are entering a dog eat dog capitalist slugfest where a lucky few winners take all. They're graduating into relative poverty and crushing debt, with no realistic opportunity to save. The job prospects for people without experience are generally awful. You're up against the world's best, plus a growing number of privileged elite "sons of the right people" sponging up all the really good jobs. Crappy work as a temp worker if you're lucky, stocking shelves or waiting tables if you're not. Good luck finding an actual full-time office gig related to your degree, unless you're top of your class. And even if you do, you're under constant threat of PIP, downsizing, or AI taking your place. "Find the people that you think are interesting" is kind of tone deaf happy-talk in today's reality.
"Don't be curmudgeonly." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What counts as being curmudgeonly? Here's one heuristic: if a comment is flying close to the planet "Everything is worse than it used to be," then it probably is.
There's also this one, btw: "Please don't fulminate." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I changed my mind. The speech is great. New graduates should totally listen to it and follow it's extremely relevant advice.
Really? Not a single thing? Not "work hard," or "be curious," or "be willing to fail or be wrong?" Those aren't genetic qualities, they can be taught and they can be learned.
I don't know when you graduated but I've been working professionally for nearly 2 decades now and I heard the same thing when I graduated - about how it was so much easier just 5, 10, 15 years prior, how I was in for a real battle, how I had an insurmountable amount of debt given my earnings prospects. And yes it was hard but I survived - I could have made smarter decisions to make it easier, I could have made worse decisions and ended up a barista in my late 30s. On a systemic level it might be harder now, it might not be. But they will survive as all previous generations have and will continue to.
There seems to be a bimodal distribution in people 20-30 years post-college discussing today's graduates. It's either "these kids are so lazy noboDY wAntS To WorK ANYMore just have a firm handshake" nonsense, or "these children will be wage slaves forever and it is undeniably the fault of capitalism/AI/Musk/whatever boogeyman."
I think it was hard when I started out. I think it's probably a little harder now. That doesn't mean it's any more of a "dog eat dog capitalist slugfest" than it was 10, 20, 30 years prior.
On the whole the graduate market has indeed been getting fairly steadily worse, and student greater, for the past forty or more years, no?
If you believe that to be true, perhaps it might be worth trying to become one of the few lucky winners.
Or come on, learn some Python and take the second prize with a six digit salary in a corporation, private health insurance and benefits plan.
Not even sure how well founded that fear is, but I would otherwise love to do rock climbing.
I liked the rails/steering advise, disliked the fake it till you make it advice.
searching for answers.. does not make life interesting.
search questions.. then You become interesting.
and inconvenient. To the answer-manufacturers. (whole industries and institutions are dealing with only that)
which.. by itself.. IS interesting.
Most people are either answers - pretty boring - or not even answers.. only nondescript. banal.
incredibly predictable and.. like nylon bag, you see through it but cannot get through.
Search for people-questions.
Search.
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Maybe it can help someone else too..