(2005-02-09) Graham High School

Paul Graham on "What You'll Wish You'd Known in High School". 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... 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... If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a DayJob. 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... Right now most of you feel your job in life is to be a promising college applicant (College Education). But that means you're designing your life to satisfy a process so mindless that there's a whole industry devoted to subverting it (Virtual School). No wonder you become cynical... So what do you do? What you should not do is rebel. That's what I did, and it was a mistake... 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... And what's your real job supposed to be? Unless you're Mozart, your first task is to figure that out... Curiosity turns work into play (Play Ethic)... One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline... 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... If it takes years to articulate great questions, what do you do now, at sixteen? Work toward finding one... 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... A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is to find good books. Most books are bad.