Things Your Commencement Speaker Won't Tell You
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-Make connections to others
My boy scout leader used to say, "Humans are herd animals." Even if you're an introvert and socializing sounds like the worst torture imaginable, at least invite a friend over to watch a movie once a week or sign up for the company bowling league. The research says it will make you healthier, happier, and longer lived. Also: eat with other people sometimes. I have no idea why it works, but eating together builds stronger relationships faster.
-Volunteer
The schools and charities in this country could use a ton more volunteer time that they're getting. Go read to kids or help with math homework once a week or even once a month. Help clean up at the local emergency food shelf. Tell the local boy scout troop you'll make them a web site. If you show up on time and work reasonably hard you will likely be treated like a hero. (And if the organization doesn't treat you like a hero, find a different place to volunteer.) As a bonus, you'll look awesome if you can start a sentence with, "I just came back from reading to first graders..."
-Give some money to charity
If you have a steady job, try to give at least 2 percent of your income to charity. Keep it to one or two institutions if you can. If you give a thousand dollars or more to most charities or educational institutions you get invited to go to all the fancy benefits and events they hold. That can be a great way to make connections for somebody with ambition. Again, if you're not married, there's no better way to impress a date than to take him/her to a fancy benefit dinner where they talk about how awesome donors (i.e. you) are.
http://www.livescience.com/4443-study-good-feel-good.html
(first link I found, plenty of other studies)
At least it seems to me that people like me who don't care about strangers would get very little out if volunteering.
As for impressing a date, who really wants to date a doormat.
I like much of the advice of that essay, which is the second Paul Graham essay local friends recommended that I read. I have all my children read Paul's essay, as we are a homeschooling family precisely to get out of the rut of the usual school pattern of learning.
". . . . In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.
"Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good.
"I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right."
Great stuff, still good advice for young people almost a decade after it was first composed.
I would also add time, that's the most important thing! When you get older you'll see that a lot of the breadth-first approach to life that you can do in your youth has now become depth-first, i.e. you won't have the time or opportunity to branch out to much. So experiment a lot when you're young.
That's what I would want my son to learn are the most important things, not just to get a good job but for everything in lide: maintain and build a good network and manage time choices wisely.
It has inspired me to live my life differently.
Lets see if I have the follow through.
(just because you are older and have less spare time, does not mean you can't branch out a little)
http://vimeo.com/57350121 (audio)
Also, while it's financially advantageous to have a two-income family, once you have kids priorities might change. The better choice may be to have a parent at home with the kid(s) instead of utilizing day-care.
You're mileage may vary.
Simply hoarding cash for the rainy day scenario seems like such an awful way to live life. Sure, don't over spend, don't waste, and don't frivolously throw money away, but money is a means to doing things.
While it's true that you can pay for most of those things with a credit card and make monthly payments, may I be so presumptuous as to point out that if you made those monthly payments before you incurred the charges--i.e., put the money into a savings account, even one earning only a quarter of a percent in interest--then when you pay the bill, you pay only 100% of the charges. If you wait until after you incur the charges, and make payments on your credit card, you're going to pay 120% or more of the charges.
Saving money with a near-nil interest rate may be a huge waste of money, but not saving it, and having to pay finance charges when high-ticket items need to be paid for is an even huger waste.
Not that I entirely disagree with you. Dying a rich miser who never enjoyed life is a crappy way to go, just as crappy as being old and broke. As with all things, there's a middle path that probably maximizes both short and long term happiness. :)
It's not a hoarding of cash. It's living on a proper financial diet and it is crucial that you learn it early and abide by it because, when the money does start coming in, you don't get fat and slow, you stay lean and strong.
Also, it isn't all about interest rates. It's about opportunity. Having 100k and being able to borrow 100k are 2 completely different things and the first lends oneself to be much more flexible, opportunistic, and comfortable. (Also, if someone's paying you 3% or whatever, you can bet that their making more than that elsewhere.)
I completely understand what you're saying and there are many people pushing the "rice and beans" stuff. I think that's fine for getting out of a bad spot but not sustainable.
It may seem like an awful way to live, but I wouldn't have it any other way and, so far, it's paid off several times, both financially and through incredible opportunities I couldn't have otherwise taken.
P.S. Many people who "invest" in real estate rent the property, which throws a tremendous wrench in comparisons of simple appreciation.
Looking back on my own experience a decade after my graduation, point one is definitely true. The relationships you build in college are very important and I wish someone told me this when I was in college. I have lost touch with most of my fraternity friends and other colleagues which was not wise. However, I did meet my wife in college which was a great success (point four)! She remained in contact with all her friends and has benefited greatly from it.
As a parent, I can relate to point five. There is definitely constant pressure placed on you by peers to push your children into all sorts of activities (this also ties in to point seven). Just be cognizant of the volume of activities you place you child into -- children do experience burn-out, but it manifests itself in different ways (such as behavior in the classroom). There is nothing wrong with just playing in the park or pick-up games -- not everything has to be structured.
I would also argue that, yes, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates just did things they were obsessively passionate about, and the fact that their passions turned out to line up well with what was marketable and under-exploited at the time was accidental luck. And working hard was their choice, but what about the many others who were inevitably working just as hard? They might've had a similar passion, but they weren't lucky enough to have the skills, timing, and luck that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had. I would hope they don't spend their lives feeling inadequate because of that.
C.S. Lewis said, "Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it." Replace originality with greatness, and telling the truth with following your passion.
Frank Zappa
Zappa obviously didn't know about engineering school ;)
When I was asked to make this address I wondered what I had to say to you boys who are graduating. And I think I have one thing to say. If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course, you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners.
As a practical matter, a mere failure to speak out upon occassions where no statement is asked or expect from you, and when the utterance of an uncalled for suspicion is odious, will often hold you to a concurrence in palpable iniquity. Try to raise a voice that will be heard from here to Albany and watch what comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a friend of your father's, offering you a place at his office. This is your warning from the secret police. Why, if you any of young gentleman have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations, and a close enemy of most men who would wish you well.
I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. "In a few years," reasons one of them, "I shall have gained a standing, and then I shall use my powers for good." Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought, his ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.
Hard for this to work for both spouses, I guess....
What the hell?
>Being great involves luck and other circumstances beyond your control.
Certainly that plays a roll...but to neglect your own agency in becoming "great" is idiotic.
Yes, most people will become nothing, because they were never anything to begin with. But why not embrace your potential and fight for greatness. Humility, important - just as is managing your expectations, but acting powerless is so disturbingly passive and disappointing.
You define your greatness, and you fulfill that destiny. Acting as a passive being in life is boring, and meaningless. Accepting mediocrity is just one more step towards insignificance. Grasp your purpose through greatness and find something more rewarding that "accepting you won't change the world."
The "greatest" people want to change something, want to make things different, want to leave a lasting contribution - having that desire should be universally human. Farmers and factory workers are the ones who "accept their insignificance in civilization."
"You just spent four years of your life here, and are now six figures in debt as a result. You didn't have to do that. Hopefully in that 4 years and with that six figures, you learned how to educate yourself without this institution."
Who needs to spend time learning from best academic minds in CS? I can just tweet to some jackass Javascript 'rockstar'!
I'll just teach myself philosophy by reading these library books! I don't need some stuffy Oxford tutor who has been doing it for their whole life passing on their knowledge one-to-one!
Civil engineering? Making mistakes is how you learn!
I don't need a network and credentials! I'll just apply to this government policy institute with my GitHub profile and some retarded PHP library.
You people are fucking deluded. I can't believe tech has become so anti-intellectual.
Having the best academic minds teaching Bachelors, or even Masters level comp sci is a waste of resources. They might be an excellent researcher but most of what you're covering is not particularly new or controversial and can be better taught by someone whose main skillset lies in the realm of teaching rather than research.
The idea that you need someone who might otherwise be doing important work to turn up and read their power-point presentation to a bunch of undergrads in order for them to learn is retarded. Almost anyone with a decent familiarity with comp sci could be reading that stuff, or the students could be reading it from one of the many books on the subject.
Lectures were originally there, as I recall, so that people could copy down from the extremely rare book that was being read, and with very few exceptions little has changed in that regard with respect to education.
And what the hell's your distribution for best anyway? I went to university, didn't meet anyone smarter than myself. I'm probably not a genius but since none of the professors were trying to do anything hard in our presence....
The best argument for university has nothing to do with professors, it has to do with other students you'll meet and having the chance to argue over subjects with them and work on projects with them. But that you need to be in a lecture hall with the best minds to learn? That's just cargo-cult bullshit.
You also get to hang out with a bunch of people doing similar things. You compete with them; you learn from them; you learn by teaching them.
You get to talk to people who have done important things in the field you're working in.
Of course, this is all in the ideal situation. Unfortunately modern education seems, for many people, to be "cram 'em in to get the funding". The education is secondary. Certainly some universities in the UK appear to be just extensions of 6th form education, and not the launchpad into proper academic rigorousness that they should be. (Not all, obviously. There's a lot of great work coming out of uni's.)
It makes me angry because it's so fucking arrogant! There are people working at colleges who have a lifetime of experience, hundreds of peer-reviewed publications and grants, and people just think they can teach themselves all of that without any of their help!
College opens doors. It's as simple as that; no guarantees other than it surely helps. Some can be self taught and build their own doors, but the rest of us mortals don't want to wait two decades to be allowed to do engineering work. I'd rather play with toys _today_.
There are other parts of the tech community with a much different tone. There's academia itself, of course: I'd consider folks like the machine-learning and robotics communities to be part of the "tech community". And in industry, there are places like Microsoft Research and some parts of Google, doing things like designing F# and advancing NLP. Even at less explicitly "researchy" places, a lot of companies value people with solid science/engineering fundamentals.
1. They're highly successful. Most people aren't.
2. The validation of an academic meritocracy where many top members (compared to anything else in society) hate the corporate world means that they're likely to be people of merit. Most highly successful people aren't.
They're great at inspiring, but they've had just too much good luck to know how the world really works and what people are actually like. You have to fail in a hard-core sort of way that most people wouldn't survive to get that understanding.
I love the part where he talks about Reed College and says something along the lines of "It was almost as expensive as Stanford" and he chuckled. The camera pans to the audience, and you can see the Professors behind him just stare with a straight face. Kind of seemed like he reminded all the students in the audience (and some adults I am sure) that they are now carrying around a mountain of debt.
Exceptions always abound, though, and there are always a few who fall through the cracks (and these people tend to show up on HN attacking my assetions :) )
'Would I regret spending my life this way if I were to get hit by a bus next week or next year? And the important corollary: Does this path lead to a life I will be happy with and proud of in 10 or 20 years if I don't get hit by a bus.'
I wonder how many of the kids at commencement will remember what the speaker told them a year from then? Or five years?