What You'll Wish You'd Known

[What You'll Wish You'd Known]

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| 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. [1]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. [2]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?UpwindI 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. 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.AmbitionIn 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

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