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Comment by codefreeordie | Hacker News Reader

The funny/sad thing is that mostly our society doesn't actually work that way -- we just believe that it does.

You can absolutely have a highly successful career and life, for a wide variety of definitions of successful, without attending a top college, and while having "interesting" life experiences for all sorts of definitions of interesting.

There are many paths through life even in our current bureaucracy-ridden society -- it's just that we very heavily oversell one specific one to the point that we make it destructively competitive.

(There are some paths, mostly in medicine and law, which actually+/- require the Standard Elite Collegiate Life Path, but many other happy and successful outcomes do not actually)

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It really depends on your definition of success. If you know enough Stanford grads - you’d know that many of them will consider themselves failures in life if they haven’t founded and IPO/sold a company for $100m+. I know quite a few like this… I also know quite a few who did it and only think they’re a success in life because of said event.

Does nobody tell them that they are being ridiculous?

They will just look at you with an expression of pity and slight disgust.

At which point you can laugh while pissing on their Ferrari

There is in fact a quite famous example of this, involving some kind of medical device. I blame Stanford/SV culture for that one.

If you want to IPO a tech company and make a minimum of 9 figures, then going to Stanford is probably a part of the most reliable (or, at least, "least unreliable") path to doing so.

Or, at least, it was back when Stanford was the kind of place that it is in the process of not being anymore.

Even then, though, realistically if you're not already part of the "Stanford Set", following that path probably doesn't radically change your chances of success at that specific mission.

Most people aren't successful for the reasons they imagine, but more importantly - most people aren't unsuccessful for the reasons they imagine. The increasingly democratic views of what is and isn't successful are our society's greatest I'll, as much as I do hope people keep supporting the things they love and wish to be.

Indeed. You don't need "a good, respectable career" to have a good life. Even if you wish to have a life containing moderate wealth, you still don't need that. (Up to you whether you believe that moderate wealth is either required or desirable for a "successful" life)

And even if you want "a good, respectable career", there are many paths to achieving that goal as well.

I feel that we have allowed too much "program thinking" to control our school-age children. We put them in the best preschool program we can afford, then run them through a carefully managed elementary program, finally we push them into an elite-college-prep high-schools program and then enroll them in a university degree program.

Afterward, is it a surprise that these kids graduate and expect to find pre-mapped "programs" to follow for the next part of their lives?

And bigger companies know this and will oblige -- intern programs, of course, and then new-grad programs and well-tended career ladder progression with a performance review program.

None of this is bad by itself, but it is unnecessarily limiting to look at life as a series of programs. It is allowing others to define success for you. Which is easy -- because deciding what the eff you want out of life is hard -- but it is so limiting.

Even if what you end up doing looks kinda like one of the programs, choosing the path yourself is so valuable.

> You don't need "a good, respectable career" to have a good life.

Unless you're willing to live as a hermit in the wild or as a hobo/beggar on the streets - which if it suits you is fine, not taking that away - you don't have another choice because you all but need a very well paying job simply to afford a shack to live in.

The number one thing that forces young people into the crushing grinds of big corporate life is the enormous explosion of cost of living, particularly cost of housing and corresponding with it the complete disconnect between the minimum wage and the cost of living.

And yes there are "the trades" aka manual labor which also pay somewhat well, the problem with these is that you won't make it to retirement in these jobs and enjoy your retirement. The trades are brutal on your body and that brutality is rarely acknowledged.

There are other paths. You can operate all sorts of small independent businesses (not just "the trades"). It's a challenging path that requires lots of hustle and produces less reliable (but not necessarily lower) economic results.

Your comment reminds me of Steve Jobs amazing commencement address to the Stanford Class of 2005.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd_ptbiPoXM

I try to watch it once a year, especially with grad students and postdocs. Gets better each time.

I wonder what those 'democratic views' are where you live.

Here, there are many distinct views by the many political parties that are part of the democracy and can't really be lumped into one 'view'. The few commonalities between them (here) seem to be around the concept of "bad situations in life shouldn't mean you're screwed forever" and "if we work together when we can, it generally turns out better for everyone". I don't think those concepts (which might also be views) generally dictate the value of success, or describe what that success must be.

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