Such a wake-up call to take ownership of your direction, rather than waiting for the next “station” to appear.
Find Your People
111–120 of 297 posts
Re: Find Your People
#112> The first step is to realize that the subway stops here. Up to this point in life, most of you have been rolling on train tracks. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college—it was always clear what the next stop was. In the process you've been trained to believe something that’s not true: that all of life is train tracks. And there are some jobs where you can make it stay like train tracks if you want,…
Very true and a good social circle consisting of people with ambitions and aspirations helps too. I remember back when we were in college, freshman year we formed a circle of some sort and moved to apartments next to each other for the sophomore year. My roommate in this setup out of the blue got an internship at a big company in the Bay Area, surprised all of us in this group. He was getting paid a really large amount per hour and at that point we didn't even know this was possible. That made us all realize that this is a thing and the job fairs from that point on weren't going to be bullshit like other events before. People were coming in with actual intent to hire, and were ready to pay interns a lot of money. And we saw once these people made friends in these internships and demonstrated themselves, they got hired through internal priority queues. We did the same, applied to places, interviewed, got flown for in person interviews. Got internships, and then those turned into full time offers. Everyone in my friend group had an internship from a well known company and had offers by the time they were graduating.
And then there was the other kind. It's not like we didn't enjoy our college days or go out to party more than we should. It's not like we studied extra. It was just this one guy in our friend group that did what he did, we saw what he did and got the message it was time and anything after that would be unnecessarily risking it.
Re: Find Your People
#113"Which leads me to my final point about getting ambitious plans: you have to be immune to rejection. People are going to dismiss you at first. If that's enough to stop you, you're doomed. So you have to learn to ignore it. And that's harder than it sounds—social pressure is so powerful. But everyone who does ambitious things has to learn how to resist it." Lots of people who learn to do this cause lots of chaos and d…
> Lots of people who learn to do this cause lots of chaos and destruction in their wake. At the same time, lots of people who do this end up being extremely successful. The difficulty is knowing which rejection and criticism to ignore. Imagine losing out on a multi-billion dollar business because your initial pitch was dismissed by people saying your business is pointless and redundant because rsync already exists[0]…
> end up being extremely successful
At making money, likely true. Leaving a trail of destruction in your wake is just not my idea of success.
Re: Find Your People
#114[deleted]
Re: Find Your People
#115> The first step is to realize that the subway stops here. Up to this point in life, most of you have been rolling on train tracks. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college—it was always clear what the next stop was. In the process you've been trained to believe something that’s not true: that all of life is train tracks. And there are some jobs where you can make it stay like train tracks if you want,…
> I don't blame the kids, they don't know any better. They've spent their whole life focusing on the next goal.
No, they spent their whole lives being sheltered. Let's call it what it is. These people were on tracks because they were put on tracks from a young age and told that the track leads somewhere, and any questioning of the tracks was often met with a harsh rebuke. They didn't play outside with the neighborhood kids, they were at soccer practice. They didn't get a summer job at a shitty fast food joint, they were doing summer school or learning piano. Everything they've done from start to finish has been curated. Of course when the track ends abruptly it's catastrophic.
Independence, curiosity, and self-quesitoning and awareness are often not taught because "getting ahead" is more important.
Re: Find Your People
#116> The first step is to realize that the subway stops here. Up to this point in life, most of you have been rolling on train tracks. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college—it was always clear what the next stop was. In the process you've been trained to believe something that’s not true: that all of life is train tracks. And there are some jobs where you can make it stay like train tracks if you want,…
i think its interesting that for so many college kids, the post-graduation options that continue to provide tracks are also treated as the more "prestigious" options (go to grad school. work at big3/faang, etc). it's not because they are any more prestigious or important, but because they provide a clear sense of achievement/external validation and kids that make it to the end of college are kids that have had decade…
I don’t see why that can’t be replicated in vocational trades.
Main challenge there is you don’t have a plumbing/electrical conglomerate like you have in tech to standardize recruiting.
Re: Find Your People
#117> This fact is so terrifying that a lot of people try to remain in denial about it.
I remember talking as college seniors about how: for two decades there’s always been some near-future end-of-school-term date that we’re all marching together toward, and isn’t it so strange that the whole cycle is about to disappear?
if next_end_date.nil?
# ?!? FIXME
end
Of course it’s somewhat possible to join new calendar cycles. A two-week engineering sprint. Even YC’s batch concept recreates this for a few months, to great effect! But not the same.
But for the most part, when the calendar rhythm is no longer the source of medium-term stability and inspiration and motivation, I think this makes a good point that the people you surround yourself with can be. If not, what else?
Thank you, Jessica.
Re: Find Your People
#118I feel like I'm too thoroughly cynical and jaded to take the tropes in "graduation speeches" seriously. Bringing someone back in who graduated in a totally different time, to a totally different world, in a totally different competitive, political, and economic landscape, to ramble about what they did when they graduated seems kind of pointless. Is her (or anyone's) story from the 90s really useful for someone gradua…
> Ms. Livingston graduated around when I did. I can't think of anything that I (or she) did to launch a career, either pre- or post-graduation that would be applicable to someone graduating today. Really? Not a single thing? Not "work hard," or "be curious," or "be willing to fail or be wrong?" Those aren't genetic qualities, they can be taught and they can be learned. I don't know when you graduated but I've been wo…
> I don't know when you graduated but I've been working professionally for nearly 2 decades now and I heard the same thing when I graduated - about how it was so much easier just 5, 10, 15 years prior, how I was in for a real battle, how I had an insurmountable amount of debt given my earnings prospects.
On the whole the graduate market has indeed been getting fairly steadily worse, and student greater, for the past forty or more years, no?
Re: Find Your People
#119It's great advice. Reminds me of Steve Jobs' statement:
When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life.
Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
Re: Find Your People
#120I went to my daughter's (high school) graduation yesterday. The speeches were uniformly weak except for the school trustee, who's job is basically campaigning or speaking at graduation ceremonies. Part of it was a graduate talking to his former principal at the 25-yr reunion:
says the alumnus: "...and I've tried to live my life by the advice you gave to me that day." "Can you refresh my memory?" asks the principal. "You said to me 'keep moving! keep moving!'"