What You’ll Wish You’d Known
There’s an excellent speech (although it was never given, just written) called What You’ll Wish You’d Known, by Paul Graham, essayist and programmer/computer guy, over on his website. As a full fledged “adult” these days, I can honestly say that I wish I’d thought like that when I was in high school. I might be farther along in some of my pursuits than I am now. I certainly coasted and ignored things that should I should have done because I thought they were stupid. I never seriously worked on things I wanted to work on because there was a strong sense and impression that they weren’t “real” and they’d never get me anywhere. And here I am, today, looking back on the things that interested me then but that I abandoned because of their lack of marketability, and picking them up again in my spare time. Wish I’d started doing that back then.
Avoid any path that gives you an excuse to be lazy – great advice. And advice I wish I’d followed. And advice I still need to consciously follow. It’s difficult, though, in high school. I took a creative writing course (I still had that much personal integrity that even though I was told it was a waste of my time I took it because it interested me…) and wrote story after story. Some of them I was truly proud of. Some of my poems…well, my poems were pretty much crap (especially reading them now), but anyway. There were a few really neat stories I wrote, and the germs of some stories about personal identity that I still have knocking around in the back of my head and are just waiting to be fully realized. I submitted them all to the “literary” book the school published every year. Not one of them was selected. Fine. That didn’t bother me so much – what bothered me was that one story I hadn’t submitted, a story I’d tossed off in about 4 minutes to fulfil a course requirement which was full of cliches (intentionally) and, because I wasn’t interested in the assignment, I’d forced a really bad, predictable plot into the cheesiest of frameworks and turned it in, was selected and praised by the creative writing teacher. I was more than a little disillusioned for more than a few years. Indeed, the other thing I’d done for the booklet, a few sketches, were little more than doodles that the instructor had seen and requested. Wonderful.
Let’s hope a few other people read his article and manage to do some amazing things.
