Written by Paul Graham and shamelessly copied with his permission...
January 2005
(I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the
school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.)
When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious. What will
you say to high school students? So I asked them, what do you wish someone had
told you in high school? Their answers were remarkably similar. So I'm going to
tell you what we all wish someone had told us.
I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high school: what
you want to do with your life. People are always asking you this, so you think
you're supposed to have an answer. But adults ask this mainly as a conversation
starter. They want to know what sort of person you are, and this question is
just to get you talking. They ask it the way you might poke a hermit crab in a
tide pool, to see what it does.
If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my
first priority was to learn what the options were. You don't need to be in a
rush to choose your life's work. What you need to do is discover what you like.
You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you do.
It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but it
turns out to be hard, partly because it's hard to get an accurate picture of
most jobs. Being a doctor is not the way it's portrayed on TV. Fortunately you
can also watch real doctors, by volunteering in hospitals.
But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them
yet. Most of the work I've done in the last ten years didn't exist when I was in
high school. The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself
speeding up. In such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.
And yet every May, speakers all over the country fire up the Standard Graduation
Speech, the theme of which is: don't give up on your dreams. I know what they
mean, but this is a bad way to put it, because it implies you're supposed to be
bound by some plan you made early on. The computer world has a name for this:
premature optimization. And it is synonymous with disaster. These speakers would
do better to say simply, don't give up.
What they really mean is, don't get demoralized. Don't think that you can't do
what other people can. And I agree you shouldn't underestimate your potential.
People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And
most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful
attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the
story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the
subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate
genius. 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.
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.
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?
Upwind
I think the solution is to work in the other direction. Instead of working back
from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most
successful people actually do anyway.
In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty
years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that
you don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options
available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of
options afterward.
It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time.
Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later
about which you'll take.
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.
How do you do that, though? Even if math is upwind of economics, how are you
supposed to know that as a high school student?
Well, you don't, and that's what you need to find out. I can give you some tips
on how to recognize upwind. Look for smart people and hard problems. Smart
people tend to clump together, and if you can find such a clump, it's probably
worthwhile to join it. But it's not straightforward to find these, because there
is a lot of faking going on.
To a newly arrived undergraduate, all university departments look much the same.
The professors all seem forbiddingly intellectual and publish papers
unintelligible to outsiders. But while in some fields the papers are
unintelligible because they're full of hard ideas, in others they're
deliberately written in an obscure way to seem as if they're saying something
important. This may seem a scandalous proposition, but it has been
experimentally verified, in the famous Social Text affair. Suspecting
that the papers published by literary theorists were often just
intellectual-sounding nonsense, a physicist deliberately wrote a paper full of
intellectual-sounding nonsense, and submitted it to a literary theory journal,
which published it.
The best protection is always to be working on hard problems. Writing novels is
hard. Reading novels isn't. Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that
something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be able to
understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be
suspense.
Well, this seems a grim view of the world, you may think. What I'm telling you
is that you should worry? Yes, but it's not as bad as it sounds. It's
exhilarating to overcome worries. You don't see faces much happier than people
winning gold medals. And you know why they're so happy? Relief.
I'm not saying this is the only way to be happy. Just that some kinds of worry
are not as bad as they sound.
Ambition
In practice, "stay upwind" reduces to "work on hard problems." And you can start
today. I wish I'd grasped that in high school.
Most people like to be good at what they do. In the so-called real world this
need is a powerful force. But high school students rarely benefit from it,
because they're given a fake thing to do. When I was in high school, I let
myself believe that my job was to be a high school student. And so I let my need
to be good at what I did be satisfied by merely doing well in school.
If you'd asked me in high school what the difference was between high school
kids and adults, I'd have said it was that adults had to earn a living. Wrong.
It's that adults take responsibility for themselves. Making a living is only a
small part of it. Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for
oneself.
If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job. I don't
mean that I'd slack in school. Working at something as a day job doesn't mean
doing it badly. It means not being defined by it. I mean I wouldn't think of
myself as a high school student, just as a musician with a day job as a waiter
doesn't think of himself as a waiter.
When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they nearly all say
the same thing: that they wasted so much time. If you're wondering what you're
doing now that you'll regret most later, that's probably it.
Some people say this is inevitable-- that high school students aren't capable of
getting anything done yet. But I don't think this is true. And the proof is that
you're bored. You probably weren't bored when you were eight. When you're eight
it's called "playing" instead of "hanging out," but it's the same thing. And
when I was eight, I was rarely bored. Give me a back yard and a few other kids
and I could play all day.
The reason this got stale in middle school and high school, I now realize, is
that I was ready for something else. Childhood was getting old.
I'm not saying you shouldn't hang out with your friends-- that you should all
become humorless little robots who do nothing but work. Hanging out with friends
is like chocolate cake. You enjoy it more if you eat it occasionally than if you
eat nothing but chocolate cake for every meal. No matter how much you like
chocolate cake, you'll be pretty queasy after the third meal of it. And that's
what the malaise one feels in high school is: mental queasiness.
You may be thinking, we have to do more than get good grades. We have to have
extracurricular activities. But you know perfectly well how bogus most of
these are. Collecting donations for a charity is an admirable thing to do, but
it's not hard. It's not getting something done. What I mean by getting
something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or
what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to draw the human
face from life. This sort of thing rarely translates into a line item on a
college application.
Corruption
It's dangerous to design your life around getting into college, because the
people you have to impress to get into college are not a very discerning
audience. At most colleges, it's not the professors who decide whether you get
in, but admissions officers, and they are nowhere near as smart. They're the
NCOs of the intellectual world. They can't tell how smart you are. The mere
existence of prep schools is proof of that.
Few parents would pay so much for their kids to go to a school that didn't
improve their admissions prospects. Prep schools openly say this is one of their
aims. But what that means, if you stop to think about it, is that they can hack
the admissions process: that they can take the very same kid and make him seem a
more appealing candidate than he would if he went to the local public school.
Right now most of you feel your job in life is to be a promising college
applicant. But that means you're designing your life to satisfy a process so
mindless that there's a whole industry devoted to subverting it. No wonder you
become cynical. The malaise you feel is the same that a producer of reality TV
shows or a tobacco industry executive feels. And you don't even get paid a lot.
So what do you do? What you should not do is rebel. That's what I did, and it
was a mistake. I didn't realize exactly what was happening to us, but I smelled
a major rat. And so I just gave up. Obviously the world sucked, so why bother?
When I discovered that one of our teachers was herself using Cliff's Notes, it
seemed par for the course. Surely it meant nothing to get a good grade in such a
class.
In retrospect this was stupid. It was like someone getting fouled in a soccer
game and saying, hey, you fouled me, that's against the rules, and walking off
the field in indignation. Fouls happen. The thing to do when you get fouled is
not to lose your cool. Just keep playing.
By putting you in this situation, society has fouled you. Yes, as you suspect, a
lot of the stuff you learn in your classes is crap. And yes, as you suspect, the
college admissions process is largely a charade. But like many fouls, this one
was unintentional.
Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be
defined by what they tell you to do. The best plan, I think, is to step onto an
orthogonal vector. Don't just do what they tell you, and don't just refuse to.
Instead treat school as a day job. As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet. You're
done at 3 o'clock, and you can even work on your own stuff while you're there.
Curiosity
And what's your real job supposed to be? Unless you're Mozart, your first task
is to figure that out. What are the great things to work on? Where are the
imaginative people? And most importantly, what are you interested in? The word
"aptitude" is misleading, because it implies something innate. The most powerful
sort of aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests
are often acquired tastes.
A distorted version of this idea has filtered into popular culture under the
name "passion." I recently saw an ad for waiters saying they wanted people with
a "passion for service." The real thing is not something one could have for
waiting on tables. And passion is a bad word for it. A better name would be
curiosity.
Kids are curious, but the curiosity I mean has a different shape from kid
curiosity. Kid curiosity is broad and shallow; they ask why at random about
everything. In most adults this curiosity dries up entirely. It has to: you
can't get anything done if you're always asking why about everything. But in
ambitious adults, instead of drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep. The
mud flat morphs into a well.
Curiosity turns work into play. For Einstein, relativity wasn't a book full of
hard stuff he had to learn for an exam. It was a mystery he was trying to solve.
So it probably felt like less work to him to invent it than it would seem to
someone now to learn it in a class.
One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing
great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a
boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them.
So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying
that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything,
not even a cup of coffee.
Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of
them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find
it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in.
One still hasn't sent out his half of the thank-you notes from his wedding, four
years ago. Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox.
I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You probably need
about the amount you need to go running. I'm often reluctant to go running, but
once I do, I enjoy it. And if I don't run for several days, I feel ill. It's the
same with people who do great things. They know they'll feel bad if they don't
work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start
working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no
longer necessary.
Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently trying to write
Great Literature? Of course not. He was having fun. That's why he's so good.
If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity about a
promising question. The critical moment for Einstein was was when he looked at
Maxwell's equations and said, what the hell is going on here?
It can take years to zero in on a productive question, because it can take years
to figure out what a subject is really about. To take an extreme example,
consider math. Most people think they hate math, but the boring stuff you do in
school under the name "mathematics" is not at all like what mathematicians do.
The great mathematician G. H. Hardy said he didn't like math in high school
either. He only took it up because he was better at it than the other students.
Only later did he realize math was interesting-- only later did he start to ask
questions instead of merely answering them correctly.
When a friend of mine used to grumble because he had to write a paper for
school, his mother would tell him: find a way to make it interesting. That's
what you need to do: find a question that makes the world interesting. People
who do great things look at the same world everyone else does, but notice some
odd detail that's compellingly mysterious.
And not only in intellectual matters. Henry Ford's great question was, why do
cars have to be a luxury item? What would happen if you treated them as a
commodity? Franz Beckenbauer's was, in effect, why does everyone have to stay in
his position? Why can't defenders score goals too?
Now
If it takes years to articulate great questions, what do you do now, at sixteen?
Work toward finding one. Great questions don't appear suddenly. They gradually
congeal in your head. And what makes them congeal is experience. So the way to
find great questions is not to search for them-- not to wander about thinking,
what great discovery shall I make? You can't answer that; if you could, you'd
have made it.
The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas,
but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep
your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost. Einstein, Ford, and
Beckenbauer all used this recipe. They all knew their work like a piano player
knows the keys. So when something seemed amiss to them, they had the confidence
to notice it.
Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems interesting: to
master some chunk of material, or to make something, or to answer some question.
Choose a project that will take less than a month, and make it something you
have the means to finish. Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only
just, especially at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose
whichever seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat
till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes self-sustaining,
and each project generates the next one. (This could take years.)
It may be just as well not to do a project "for school," if that will restrict
you or make it seem like work. Involve your friends if you want, but not too
many, and only if they're not flakes. Friends offer moral support (few startups
are started by one person), but secrecy also has its advantages. There's
something pleasing about a secret project. And you can take more risks, because
no one will know if you fail.
Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be on the path to some goal you're
supposed to have. Paths can bend a lot more than you think. So let the path grow
out the project. The most important thing is to be excited about it, because
it's by doing that you learn.
Don't disregard unseemly motivations. One of the most powerful is the desire to
be better than other people at something. Hardy said that's what got him
started, and I think the only unusual thing about him is that he admitted it.
Another powerful motivator is the desire to do, or know, things you're not
supposed to. Closely related is the desire to do something audacious. Sixteen
year olds aren't supposed to write novels. So if you try, anything you achieve
is on the plus side of the ledger; if you fail utterly, you're doing no worse
than expectations.
Beware of bad models. Especially when they excuse laziness. When I was in high
school I used to write "existentialist" short stories like ones I'd seen by
famous writers. My stories didn't have a lot of plot, but they were very deep.
And they were less work to write than entertaining ones would have been. I
should have known that was a danger sign. And in fact I found my stories pretty
boring; what excited me was the idea of writing serious, intellectual stuff like
the famous writers.
Now I have enough experience to realize that those famous writers actually
sucked. Plenty of famous people do; in the short term, the quality of one's work
is only a small component of fame. I should have been less worried about doing
something that seemed cool, and just done something I liked. That's the actual
road to coolness anyway.
A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is to find good
books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad.
The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be
taught, go out and learn.
Your life doesn't have to be shaped by admissions officers. It could be shaped
by your own curiosity. It is for all ambitious adults. And you don't have to
wait to start. In fact, you don't have to wait to be an adult. There's no switch
inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from
some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take
responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age.
This may sound like bullshit. I'm just a minor, you may think, I have no money,
I have to live at home, I have to do what adults tell me all day long. Well,
most adults labor under restrictions just as cumbersome, and they manage to get
things done. If you think it's restrictive being a kid, imagine having kids.
The only real difference between adults and high school kids is that adults
realize they need to get things done, and high school kids don't. That
realization hits most people around 23. But I'm letting you in on the secret
early. So get to work. Maybe you can be the first generation whose greatest
regret from high school isn't how much time you wasted.
Notes
Treating high school as a day job might actually make it easier for some
students to get good grades. If you treat your classes as a game, you won't be
demoralized if they seem pointless.
However bad your classes, you need to get good grades in them to get into a
decent college. And that is worth doing, because universities are where a
lot of the clumps of smart people are these days.
I think what they really mean, in the latter case, is caring what random people
thought of them. Adults care just as much what other people think, but they get
to be more selective about the other people.
I have about thirty friends whose opinions I care about, and the opinion of the
rest of the world barely affects me. The problem in high school is that your
peers are chosen for you by accidents of age and geography, rather than by you
based on respect for their judgement.
It might also be argued that kids who went to prep schools, because they've
learned more, are better college candidates. But this seems empirically
false. What you learn in even the best high school is rounding error compared to
what you learn in college. Public school kids arrive at college with a slight
disadvantage, but they start to pull ahead in the sophomore year.
(I'm not saying public school kids are smarter than preppies, just that they are
within any given college. That follows necessarily if you agree prep schools
improve kids' admissions prospects.)
Thanks to Ingrid Bassett, Trevor Blackwell, Rich Draves, Dan Giffin,
Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Mark Nitzberg,
Lisa Randall, and Aaron Swartz for reading drafts of this, and to many others
for talking to me about high school.