High school advice from Paul Graham

I was reminded today of Paul Graham’s essay for high school students entitled What You’ll Wish You’d Known. It’s a wonderfully irreverent essay from a brilliant computer scientist. (Graham is famous for his writing on the Lisp programming language and, more recently, his work on spam filtering.)

Graham’s essay cleverly counters the obsession on college admission that has trapped so many high school students.

Right now most of you feel your job in life is to be a promising college applicant. But that means you’re designing your life to satisfy a process so mindless that there’s a whole industry devoted to subverting it. No wonder you become cynical. The malaise you feel is the same that a producer of reality TV shows or a tobacco industry executive feels. And you don’t even get paid a lot.

More interesting for me (and more on-topic for this blog) are his thoughts about finding challenges and ambition.

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.

And then…

Most people like to be good at what they do. In the so-called real world this need is a powerful force. But high school students rarely benefit from it, because they’re given a fake thing to do. When I was in high school, I let myself believe that my job was to be a high school student. And so I let my need to be good at what I did be satisfied by merely doing well in school.

It saddens me to see so many bright students succeed not by finding hard problems to work on, but by gaming the system. Students are conditioned to do the least work possible because there’s almost no incentive to do otherwise. The kind of educational transformations that Will has been blogging about lately will only come about when students are empowered to break out of the hamster wheel. All this technology will be seriously disruptive to the educational establishment. I can’t wait.