What You'll Wish You'd Known 798
sheck writes "Eminent computer scientist, author, painter, and dot-com millionaire, Paul Graham has written down the things he wishes somebody had told him when he was in high school in What You'll Wish You'd Known, suggesting, among other things, that students treat school like a day job, working on interesting projects to avoid what he has found to be the most common regret among adults of their high school days: wasting time."
Re:No wonder he was un-invited (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Einstein (Score:3, Informative)
From Wikipedia:
Companion Essay: Why Nerds Are Unpopular (Score:3, Informative)
Why Nerds Are Unpopular [paulgraham.com]
His old essay explains why high school sucks. This new one explains what you can do about it.
Re:Learn it all for yourself. It's part of growing (Score:3, Informative)
And they are the same ones who will leave you horrible code, because they learned from web examples instead of a solid base. (real life case: mantain legacy app created by self-taught genius: a few thousands of lines of java, in ONE CLASS, with scores of static fields and static methods)
My point? The skills you say are the property of the self-taught can be taught. At my school, we get battered with two solid years of advanced math and physics (it's an engineering school, after a common base of math-physics-and-spices you go to your area of interest, be it CS or structural engineering or pure math or chemical engineering or whatever) that teach you how to approach problems. In this market, the alumni of my school are known for just the traits you describe (pick up things easily, not afraid of unorthodox solutions, etc.)
Sorry, my experience with self-taught people isn't as good as yours :)
Re:get a Roth IRA (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Learn it all for yourself. It's part of growing (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Learn it all for yourself. It's part of growing (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What I'd Wish I'd Known (Score:4, Informative)
Re:"youth is wasted on the young" (Score:2, Informative)
I went to a rich-kid high-school on scholarship - the kind where parents from all across the country (and for that matter, the world) send their kids to and pay top dollar for the privilege. They weren't teaching anything like that and we did not have a high-school version of skull and bones either.
But there was no "career counseling" - everyone was expected to go to college, we even had alums officially come back and tell us what to expect from college. The only real difference from the public schools (american-style "public" not british-style) was the much higher quality and intensity of academics (class on saturday, etc).
Re:"youth is wasted on the young" (Score:3, Informative)
Take a look at some of the old TV shows from the 60s and you will see people talking about how they miss the simpler times. How things where better. And of course the We fought Hitler so these dang long haired kids can do this?
Honestly in most towns you can still let your kids trick or treat by themselves. I had kids come to my house this year.
If you think of all that we have today vs then, things are better. The environment is actually cleaner in the US. You do not hear about rivers catching fire anymore. Racism has decreased. You do not see the Army going in so African American children can go to school. BTW for the record that was a Republican president that sent in the army. Most people don't give Ike the credit for ending segregation he deserves. The fact that it is talked about and that some words have become words you just do not say in polite company is another good sign.
Yes things are getting better. Just not fast enough and not soon enough.
Upwind (Score:2, Informative)
Sailing into the wind is actually a way to increase altitude, since airplanes have a little thing I like to call "lift", which increases the faster the air moves over the wings.
This is of course not really relevant to the point he was trying to make, but it is still better not to use an outright false statement for an analogy.
Re:Einstein (Score:3, Informative)
The popular image that men of eminence are learning disabled promotes an aura of romanticism around the learning disabilities (LD) field. Albert Einstein, arguably the greatest scientist of all time, is usually at the top of the list of famous dyslexics.
According to LD lore Einstein failed to talk until the age of four, the result of a language disability. It is also claimed that Einstein could not read until the age of nine. To strengthen their case LD proponents point to such facts that Einstein failed his first attempt at entrance into college and lost three teaching positions in two years.
While this makes a nice story, this widely believed notion is false, according to Ronald W. Clark's comprehensive biography of Einstein, and according to Subtle is the Lord: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, a biography by Abraham Pais (Oxford University Press, 1982).
Pais states that although his family had initial apprehensions that he might be backward because of the unusually long time before he began to talk, Einstein was speaking in whole sentences by some point between age two and three years. According to Clark, a far more plausible reason for his relatively late speech development is "the simpler situation suggested by Einstein's son Hans Albert, who says that his father was withdrawn from the world even as a boy." Whether one accepts this interpretation, other information helps us to judge Einstein's language abilities after he began to speak.
Einstein entered school at the age of six, and against popular belief did very well. When he was seven his mother wrote, "Yesterday Albert received his grades, he was again number one, his report card was brilliant." At the age of twelve Einstein was reading physics books. At thirteen, after reading the Critique of Pure Reason and the work of other philosophers, Einstein adopted Kant as his favorite author. About this time he also read Darwin. Pais states, "the widespread belief that he was a poor student is unfounded."
FAILING HIS COLLEGE ENTRANCE EXAMS
True, Einstein did not pass the college exam the first time he took it. However, aside from being only sixteen, two years below the usual age, the plain fact was he did not study for it. His father wanted his son to follow a technical occupation, a decision Einstein found difficult to confront directly. Consequently, as he later admitted, he avoided following the "unbearable" path of a "practical profession" by not preparing himself for the test.
It is also true that, after graduating from the university, Einstein had difficulty finding a post. This was mainly because his independent, intellectually rebellious nature made him, in his own words, "a pariah" in the academic community. One professor told him, "You have one fault; one can't tell you anything."
Also true is that Einstein went through three jobs in a short time, but not because of a learning disability. His first job was as a temporary research assistant, the second as temporary replacement for a professor who had to serve a two-month term in the army. Clark remarks that it is "difficult to discover but easy to imagine" why Einstein held his third job, as a teacher in a boarding school, for only a few months: "Einstein's ideas of minimum routine and minimum discipline were very different from those of his employer."
Re:"youth is wasted on the young" (Score:2, Informative)
hackers and painters [paulgraham.com] goes over all the time management and drive and time/money and worth issues of small to large businesses