This week’s guest essay is written by a father and uncle, who upon attending his nephew’s high school graduation decided to pen a few words of the type of advice that isn’t always doled out in commencement speeches. His nephew is interested in athletics and science, which is fantastic, and told his uncle he was thrilled his college– a well-regarded liberal arts university– did not have a general education requirement, which meant he’d “never have to take an English or history class ever again.” This inspired our guest author, who works in the technology industry,  to write the following. If it resonates, please feel free to share it with a graduate in your life!

Congrats again on graduating high school. I know how hard you've worked to get where you are. Well done. 

As you head into the next phase of your life, I think people don't often tell you how to actually succeed at this thing called college. All the advice is either just a bunch of cliches ("be yourself!" "seize the opportunity!") or actual advice on how to be an adult. What you actually need is advice on how to get the most out of the next 4 years. 

Here's the unspoken truth about college: it's the last 4 years when you are primarily an intake, not an output. For the last 17 years your parents, grandparents, teachers, and coaches have been pouring time, money, and knowledge INTO you. That will happen for another four years. Once you graduate from college, the responsibility shifts. At your next graduation we'll all start talking about jobs, apartments, careers, and how to build an adult life. We'll start talking about what you are going to OUTPUT. So, how do you get the most out of the last 4 years of input?

As with anything, it starts with figuring out what's most important and working backwards from that. The truth is, the most important part of a liberal arts education is not what you were told it was. You were told by a lot of folks that the most important thing in college would be some combination of friends/memories/nostalgia and skills/career/major. You do not need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get either of these. If you want a bunch of fun stories with friends forged in experience, get a job at a bar or join the Marines. If you want a bunch of hard skills, sign up for some classes at your community college. It'll be a lot cheaper (and faster). Take it from a guy who works in deep tech but in college majored in literature and philosophy (and does not have a C.S. degree)-- the hard skills are the easy part. 

The real value of a liberal arts education is a broad and deep mind. If done right, you can graduate with something that is truly hard to copy: the ability to think creatively about a problem, make connections between disciplines to find a solution, and clearly articulate your recommendation (ideally in writing). Trust me when I tell you that the engineer who can do those three things will get promoted over the one who just writes code quickly. 

So, how do you use the next 4 years to get a broad and deep mind? Do these five things:

1. Do the easy part well. Tom Hanks boiled this down to really 3 things: Be on time, Know the text, Have an idea. In other words, get to class on time (actually a few minutes early), having done the homework/reading/labs, and take a little extra time to generate your own perspective on the thing (this usually requires you to have done the reading ahead of time enough for your brain to come up with something, which usually happens when you're doing something else). Pro-tip: if you're stuck, think about the problem hard for an hour, then put it down and do something else like workout or take a walk. Background processing is powerful stuff. 

2. Find something to be excellent at. It doesn't matter what it is. Could be woodworking, could be chemistry, could be dance. All that matters is that you learn what it means to work with people who have high standards and won't accept half-assed bullshit. Once you experience "great" you will not accept mediocre. But remember: the reason you are on the team is NOT ABOUT THE SPORT. It's about learning what great looks like, and what it takes to be great at something. 

3. Find something to be shitty at. Every semester take a class you suck at. Play an instrument, take a poetry class, try boxing, for God's sake, take an English class. If you can learn new things you can adapt as the world changes (and as what you want changes). But first you have to suck. Once you learn to be comfortable being bad at something (but are willing to try it anyway), you can get really comfortable broadening out. Over the next decade the pace of change will only increase. Which means you need to get comfortable learning. And learning means sucking at first. 

4. Learn. To. Write. No, you do not know how to write. You have, at best, an above-average high school writing ability. No matter your field, from biotech to finance, the person who can clearly communicate their idea in writing has an advantage. There is a reason the leaders of organizations are not do-ers, they are communicators. They tell stories. They synthesize the complex without losing nuance. To write well you must: 1/ write a lot and 2/ read a lot. There are no shortcuts. [A side note about ChatGPT: Here I'll be blunt: don't fucking use it. Honestly, if you're using a large language model to do your homework or write your essay, you are wasting your time and your parents' money. If you're gonna do that just go home and get a job.]

5. Realize this is not water. I was lucky enough to be there in person when David Foster Wallace gave his famous graduation speech at Kenyon. Read it. He starts with this parable: "There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

I'm no David Foster Wallace, but to me the essence of his point is this: The world around you is infinitely complex and astounding, and we only get a shockingly short amount of time to be here, but everything in our daily life tries to make us forget that. The woman standing next to us in the grocery store has an inner life just as rich and nuanced as yours. There is more complexity in a grain of sand than computing power on the planet. And yet we spend most of our days chasing to-do lists and bank balances and trying to “win” at life. 

Remembering that life is infinitely complex and way too short is probably the hardest thing to do. Achievement is not the path to enlightenment. The only real path is trying to remember: "This is water. This is water." 

Good luck.