This comment of years can be categorized under "Do things, tell people" rule. haha.
You wrote and you're telling people about your life after it. It was a good read. Hope you get good leads from here!
Seriously though, I like your advice, I am someone who thinks the same way. I have artistic daughters that I have tried to instill this in since they were young. Publish or perish is another way I put it.
Or it will manifest itself as, "Got a good idea for a novel or video game? Cool, write it. Because you better believe that nearly everyone you meet every day also has a great idea for a novel or video game (or movie, etc.). The difference between Ray Bradbury and everyone else is that Bradbury sat in front of a typewriter every day." (It's possible too of course that Ray had some pretty good ideas though that not all of us had.)
That also points to the sad reality that I have found (now in my 50's BTW, no college undergrad). So many people are not motivated to "do",
I think that first came home to me when I was writing shareware games and sending floppy disks of the source code to people that would write me (send me a check).
My thought was that, having been handed compilable sources, each one of these people would have read the code, gutted it, refactored it, added their own art/sounds and started putting out their own games. That it was just the "how to" they were missing.
Not so as you might (now) imagine. Taking that step to create really is a difficult one for a lot of people. Further, going beyond "demo" and adding scoring, game completion, configurable controls, high scores, about box.... Very few put in that extra (and frankly tedious) effort.