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Comment by capocannoniere | Hacker News Reader

Paul Graham wrote an essay on this topic, aimed towards high-school students. His advice: stay upwind http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

> Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.

> 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.

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I did pretty much like he advised, though I haven't seen this article before now.

I got bored at high school and life in general. I discovered programming and thought that it's fascinating. So I decided to learn programming. I self-learned and started building my own projects, big and small.

But now a couple years after my biggest regret is exactly the same, why did I waste so much time at high school and why didn't I start earlier.

There is plenty of time to learn the things we want to learn.

How long does it take to get a bachelors in college? 4 years? How many years do we have in a lifetime? Not including our youth? 60? 70?

All it takes is dedication and persistence to learn the things we want to learn.

I think a better word to use would be "optionality". Keep your options open. You want to maximize your options. Do things that increase your options later.

That sounds like "life your life in analysis paralysis, and never decide to actually do anything"

It seems different to me. You analyze and make the upwind decision for as long as you can. Analysis paralysis has connotations of hand-wringing over what to do, and the subjective of experience of what it feels like seems major to me. You still have a course of action you want to execute, a goal of staying upwind a bit, no excessive hand-wringing necessarily required.

Try instead, "Get a minimum viable product out there, and iterate like mad".

The contrary, actually.

The future is unknown, and we are actually making decisions for our future self. When you're 18 or 25 you don't even know what interests you will have when being 35 or 40, at least I didn't know.

What Graham is saying is to make decisions that will allow you more choices in the future.

Go study math, never get a degree because you haven't studied enough (according to experts) or you weren't talented enough (according to reality), and find yourself in debt, older and with no degree. You'll totally not regret having listened to advices like this.

Not trying to start an argument, but I think most people switch majors rather than drop out in this scenario.

He doesn't tell everyone to study math. In his speech he mentions that you should be searching within your abilities, and that you need to find out what those are.

> So far we've cut the Standard Graduation Speech down from "don't give up on your dreams" to "what someone else can do, you can do." But it needs to be cut still further. There is some variation in natural ability. Most people overestimate its role, but it does exist. If I were talking to a guy four feet tall whose ambition was to play in the NBA, I'd feel pretty stupid saying, you can do anything if you really try. [2]

> 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?

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