I dislike this sort of advice for teenagers. You may as well tell them to be rock stars or professional sports people.
Tell the kids to study, don't sell them an unobtainable dream
Tell the kids to study, don't sell them an unobtainable dream
However, packaging it under a "being a mere employee is lame" mantra... Is lame!
But I'm curious. Why do you think that doing something which is maybe not study related is a bad idea?
("Maybe not" because ie. john Mayer is both a rockstar and a Berkelee grad)
Because 99.999% of those kids won't go on to start the next Google and make more money for PG's investments.
When I was at school there were a few kids who were genuinely moderately good at football/soccer. With only minor encouragement from PE staff and family they essentially had the attitude of "I don't need to study, I am going to be a professional footballer." (who by the way make huge huge huge sums of money if you are at the very top)
And how many of those went on to to be top-flight professional footballers do you think? Yep - zero. What are they doing now considering they crashed out of out of school with no qualifications, no professional sports career, and barely able to even do basic literacy and arithmetic etc? Low skilled and relatively dead-end jobs like gardeners, working on building sites, security guards etc.
They threw away their chance to study and gain skills because irresponsible and self-interested adults told them they should abandon school and concentrate on this dream of fame and fortune with essentially zero chance of it coming true. You're fucking with people's lives by doing this - don't tell people you don't need to try hard and study and learn, you just need to become a billionaire business owner!
Your guidance counsellor told hundreds of kids the same thing, and it was good advice for basically all of them. For every guy who made it rich with some crazy risky stock trade, there's hundreds of guys who lost everything. For every business that was about to go under but managed to pull through, there's hundreds that were in the same position and failed. The attitude of following in the footsteps of the lucky few just seems like it's teaching kids to double down on failure.
Everyone can spot the issue when someone is wasting their money in a casino, thinking they're one more pull on the slot machine away from becoming rich. But for some reason it's encouraged when it's reframed as "following your dreams."
There's a big difference between a casino and actively throwing yourself at problem gradients, learning, adapting.
(I would not even be surprised if some of the survivors did precisely that -- copy behavior of their successful parents, or try to prove their worth in terms of money, lacking other means to receive confirmation.)