> 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, but really today is the last stop.

Well put!

This is something _so many_ college kids don't seem to understand. I had many friends who graduated then just stood around looking for where to go next. It hadn't come up in discussions but it became apparent they were surprised by the sudden end to the "tracks" while the students who saw them coming (or were told better/more often) all were befuddled, "How did you not see this coming?", "Did you expect someone to just walk up and offer you a job?", "You have never even interned in your field??".

I don't blame the kids, they don't know any better. They've spent their whole life focusing on the next goal, I talked about this specifically (in blog post) when I dropped out of college to go full-time into my profession. For me, learning "there are no tracks" and more importantly "you don't need to go to the end of the college track before you decide next steps" was freeing and empowering while also being a bit terrifying.

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 decades of achievement/external validation being their primary measure of success.

and because of that, those places do an amazing job recruiting. i remember toward the end of my undergrad days there was huge sense of competition to get a "teach for america" position, even among folks with no interest in education. it was appealing simply because it was selective and provided a clear framework for 'next steps'.

> 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).

Graduate school is a mixed bag when it comes to prestige. It's fairly well known that grad student lifestyle is a grind, highly competitive, and a financial sacrifice. You go into it for a love of academics, not as a default next step.

As for prestigious jobs like FAANG: I think you're downplaying the extreme compensation offered by many of these jobs. It's not just about prestige, it's about unlocking a level of wealth that is hard to ignore. It delivers on the dream people have when they imagine a university education unlocking incredible career options.

grad school is definitely a prestige move. not a 'get rich move', but def a prestige move. prestige is not just money.

for med or law school, there are very clear hierarchies about who's better than who and next steps in your career. you get money AND intellectual status.

but for other sciences and humanities, it's a flex about pursuing abstract "truth" or "knowledge" of "beauty" or whatever and not caring about financial success. it is very monastic in that people make a show of forgoing traditional measures of status in service of their "calling".

... but as high-minded as these people are there is still a very clear hierarchy that lets you compare rank/compare yourself against your other recent grads so you can talk about who's doing well and who isn't even though none of them have money.

BUT grad school for CS and engineering is different because there's so much money and employability at the end of the rainbow. these aren't really a calling in the same way, and are closer to MBA degree becayse it's just a thing you do to get more money later. A comp sci PhD with a job in industry is lauded, but those folks don't understand the deep sense of failure that a non-CS PhD feels when they have to 'resort to' an industry job in the private sector

> for other sciences and humanities, it's a flex about pursue abstract "truth" or "knowledge" of "beauty" or whatever. it is very monastic in that people make a show of forgoing traditional measures of status in service of their "calling".

These comments are oddly cynical.

The people I know who went to grad school did it because they enjoyed the academic world.

That's all. There was no flexing or bragging. Those who went in for the wrong reasons very rapidly learned that it wasn't for them and dropped out.

For some people external validation is not very important and they genuinely love and enjoy the pursuit of knowledge and have little interest in what others think of them.

Sure everyone requires some degree of external validation and there is a hierarchy in every group but all is not vanity.

> Graduate school is a mixed bag when it comes to prestige. It's fairly well known that grad student lifestyle is a grind, highly competitive, and a financial sacrifice. You go into it for a love of academics, not as a default next step.

Sorry to be contrary, but almost every graduate student I have met was doing it for the prestige. The fact that they were doing a research degree, the chance of having their name on papers, the fact that they were "smarter" than people who couldn't get into graduate school.

I heard that quant finance companies target high-achievers by creating a sense of continuing tracks: recruiting based on high GPAs, an application process with a high-profile entrance exam, and so on. It creates an impression among their target group that such a company is where they "should" go to work, because it's at the top.

The weird thing with quant finance is that it basically started as a bunch of misfits from other disciplines. Mostly sub departments at banks and some funds no one ever heard of.

Now its a well trodden career path with specialized degree programs targeting it, online forums full of 16 year old aspirational hardos discussing which college to apply to in order to get into job 1 which leads to job 2 which leads to.. So again, train tracks.

Old quants are an interesting bunch to talk to. Guys who worked in plasma physics or are serious musicians or classically trained philosophy backgrounds, etc.

Now every grad resume I see for job openings looks exactly the same. I no longer deal with grad/intern programs thankfully.

Agree in spirit though I’m a bit doubtful of your details (exams or GPAs, etc). I think part of this is presenting the work as looking more like university and less like what students might imagine work to look like.

The flipside is that going off the tracks, you need to decide where you're going and you might get lost. Some people try to do something and then waste a lot of time just spinning their wheels. For them, some structure and some tracks might be necessary.

I guess we all need some amount of scaffolding in our life, at one point or another.

> 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).

I think it's the other way around: the more prestigious option becomes the track.

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.

Trade unions and apprenticeships provide some of this, especially in places where trade work is heavily unionized.

It's funny that the train tracks continue on for Asian kids in the dorm of grad school or engineering jobs

Some of my university classmates just stayed in university after graduation... Even though most of them didn't have much interest in academic research or teaching. It was just the easiest things to do: just imagine tracks going further in the same direction. Inertia is powerful.

Modern society tries very hard to lay tracks for everyone all the way to final station: The old folks home.

In my opinion, there are TOO MANY tracks.

We have plastered the entire map with so many tracks, that experiencing true freedom has become virtually impossible.

Yep. The illusion of Freedom is sold as a product, however, and people make a lot of money with it.

What do you mean by that?

We’re also too many people on Earth to continue living in a green field world. Fantasizing about freedom and the absence of tracks is a Western thing; I don’t think you can afford trial-and-error paths or separating from the cohort of applicants when you live in Singapore, Taiwan, or China. Kalzumeus had to show his bride’s mother his revenue sheet before asking her hand, because startup creator is second to homeless in the humiliation ranking.

I didn't want to go to college. I worked throughout high school designing websites for an ad agency for $8/hr, after school until 7 at night and 5 days a week in the summer. After high school I went to work for another agency full time for a year. Only after my father kept cajoling me did I finally try college. I got a scholarship and came in a year older and six years more experienced than my freshman class.

What I found myself in was a group of very sincere, optimistic, wonderful kids who had no idea how the real world of engineering or advertising or design worked, but were fully persuaded that this $30k/yr education would prepare them for it and hand them the next waypoint on their life path (while also allowing them creative freedom to experiment in ways that they wouldn't be able to later, in the corporate world). I dropped out after 3 semesters because it was pointless, although in the last semester I jumped ahead from Typography 2 to 5, and skipped a bunch of other stuff. I had poached a lot of clients from my former agency, which had folded.

Since then, my life has had no rails whatsoever. I'm good at what I do and I go where I want and choose who I work for, and the world essentially rewards me for being good at figuring things out.

All of this comes down to a lack of imagination, and parents (like my father) trying to instill a sense in their children that one must pursue certain predefined paths to be successful. But completing a predefined quest doesn't make us more valuable; in fact, it makes us interchangeable. Being a difficult, unique, tough, anal obsessive prick at what you do is hard to ever replace with a formal education. And experience is king. So start early and ignore all the tracks you can.

The book “Excellent Sheep” has an interesting portion on this. At one point someone from a non-traditional background is bemoaning the mentality of his colleagues at a prestigious university. He says they are so used to following a template of moving from point A to point B that they are completely rudderless when put in a situation where there is no template defining “success”.

> 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.

I think you're assuming way too much.

From my observations, having low parental involvement and excessively unstructured upbringing doesn't automatically produce determined and self-directed adults. From my familiarity with several small towns, I would actually say it does the opposite. I can think of many people I knew as a kid who ended up stuck in small towns at dead-end jobs simply because inertia was the only thing they knew. Nobody ever jumped into their lives to push them to try different things or explore paths that weren't sitting right in front of them.

I couldn't agree more. Parental guidance or lack thereof can work differently for different people. There are incompetent and more competent parents everywhere. But that is beside the point. You can do better now. You can start steering your own ship. That degree you were pushed to get might come in handy or not.

> From my observations, having low parental involvement and excessively unstructured upbringing doesn't automatically produce determined and self-directed adults.

Sample of one, it indeed didn't. However being knocked around did help with being somewhat more ready and open to new things and uncharted territories. It also dramatically reduces the fear of the unknown and can be a significant confidence booster.

> 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.

It's not clear to me how the "tracks" were significantly different in, say, the past 80 years, at least in America. Compulsory schooling has been a thing for a long time. Getting an after school job delivering newspapers so you have a little spending money is not exactly a clever endeavor, and it's not clear to me you learn more life skills than you do having to manage homework (for example).

Get married to someone of the opposite gender, go to church every sunday, have kids. Work a job with a pension for 30 years, retire with a gold watch. (or the blue collar equivalent). Those are tracks.

I don't disagree with the premise that kids are more coddled today than they used to be, but the "tracks" metaphor is, if anything, less valid now than ever. There is more choice, and less stability, as far as I can tell.

You learn quite a lot by working a regular job and getting a paycheck as a kid. It is utterly baffling that there are some kids graduating college that never worked a regular job. It's a problem that young kids in our modern world don't seem to even want to get jobs.

As far as I'm concerned, you are basically mentally stunted if you didn't work for pay in your teenage years.

> As far as I'm concerned, you are basically mentally stunted if you didn't work for pay in your teenage years.

I worked a teenage job, too. Physical labor.

It was a learning experience, but I don’t see it as this life changing pivot point that separated me from others. In fact, you meet plenty of people at a physical labor job like that who are clearly not on a path to being ahead of their peers, or who have been doing the same work for decades since they were a teenager.

I also know plenty of people who didn’t have any jobs until they graduated college and they turned out fine.

I think some of the lofty claims about teenage jobs being life changing or how teens who don’t get jobs are “mentally stunted” are getting absurd.

It reads like people who have developed a chip on their shoulder about their own upbringings being superior to others because they were more difficult.

> In fact, you meet plenty of people at a physical labor job like that who are clearly not on a path to being ahead of their peers, or who have been doing the same work for decades since they were a teenager.

At least for me, the experience of doing physical labor alongside people like that as a teenager was a real eye-opener. It showed me exactly what my life might look like if I didn't focus and work toward my goals. That was already my plan, but seeing the alternative first hand was pretty motivating nonetheless (and frightening).

Yep. 17 year old me working alongside a 70 year old dude working the same job as me... I knew that's not what I wanted for my life.

That said, I think I've still wafted through life on tracks. I just concluded that FAANG was the next track after uni so I made it happen. Not sure I'm happy any more though. Maybe I need to reinvent myself.

imo this is what good parenting should be about regardless of one’s class or upbringing.

It’s good to show kids which possible “doors” they can go down in life. It’s easy to claim that door X is better than door Y, but unless you have them _see_ the difference, or at least talk to someone that’s been through door Y, they won’t believe you.

There’s nothing wrong with focusing on a difficult track! But if you grow up to be an adult that doesn’t comprehend how a normal person lives, then you’ve got a problem lol.

Delayed adulthood is a real thing. Even 25 years ago many/most high school kids have after school and/or summer jobs. Now it is almost unheard of.

Their entire young lives are structured, parentally planned and resume padding. Then theres stuff like college admission consultants which have become very normalized, with allegedly 26% of parents hiring them per some study.

I worked from 14, had a crappy retail job throughout high school and my college prep was the $20 Kaplan CD lol. Whatever sports I played were the $50/season local league your parents drop you off at a couple nights a week. And my parents weren't poor, they were totally normal upper middle class low 6 figure earnings.

Nowadays the above is akin to smoking on an airplane with a baby in your lap.

But yeah, how they got where they were was never the point. The point was now you know. Now you understand you've been chasing a goal you never knew about. It is time to stop. Start thinking for yourself. Start steering the wheel. Stop drifting.

Those other things you mention are also "tracks". Getting a shitty fast food job is done not due to any kind of aspiration but simply because it's the default thing to do.

Imagine not being able to get a shitty fast food job because you are disabled. Or just moved to the US and speak too weird and don't have anyone to vouch for you.

Ditto for hanging out with the neighborhood kids. This assumes that you are one of them, and not a victim/target for them.

> Getting a shitty fast food job is done not due to any kind of aspiration but simply because it's the default thing to do.

This is the kind of "tracks" I'm most familiar with: Especially in small towns where ideas like individual freedoms, bucking the trend, and turning your nose up at higher education are common, you don't see it translating to a lot of success in life. You see it trapping people in cycles of poverty and dead-end jobs.

What a strange response. Anything is a track if you only do that one thing. The point is that having diverse life experiences that challenge you make you a much more well-rounded person that can adapt and handle difficult situations.

Well, I think people like you are strange: how weird would it be to go through life assuming that everyone thinks the same way as you!

How is working at McD's more "diverse" than playing soccer, or even tinkering with a computer at home? It's only "better" in a very specific value system, that of the American lower middle class

Or put differently: the cliche thing that every teenager does in every American movie is "diverse"? How?

Going outside and playing with other kids is "diverse" because it's unstructured time. What do you do with the time? It's up to you to decide. Do you build a fort? Egg cars? Sell plants? It's an activity that requires some amount of creativity, and it's outside the normal zone of operation (home/school/etc). The only reason I could see this as a negative is if you wish your children to grow up as cogs and automatons who are unable to think for themselves and find their own place within social structures.

As far as getting a job, I have to say it benefited me quite a bit. I was already tinkering at home (I've been programming since I was 8) but getting a job before I left home did many things for me. I got to see how things are for a lot of people in the world around me. Some people need this shitty job. I was lucky enough to be able to do it because my parents mandated it, not because I needed to make ends meet. That gave me an enormous amount of perspective and humility. "This is how things could be for you." It gave me the drive to want to do better than working in fast food, and it gave me compassion for the people who are in that situation. Compassion that, to be frank, a lot of people I've met who have not done customer service or shitty jobs lack quite a bit. Secondly, I had to get that job myself. My parents didn't pull strings, they made me go out into the world, do applications, "sell" myself, etc. It was a growth experience. The world isn't going to bend to your whim, you are going to have to do things you don't like, and you are going to have to compromise.

TL;DR: playing outside: independence + creativity. Job: independence + compromise + humility + compassion.

None of that you learn by doing homework.

> Imagine not being able to get a shitty fast food job because ... Or just moved to the US and speak too weird and don't have anyone to vouch for you.

You've obviously never worked food.

??? I got a job as a teenager because I wanted to buy a guitar. It had nothing to do with tracks. It's the same for most teens, they want to make a few extra bucks. Let's not forgot the majority of people on this forum were on a track of sorts that differs very much from the rest of the population. Being a bright nerdy kid is not the norm. Teens got jobs and mowed lawns to buy a car, weed, a guitar, etc, not to pad their highschool resume. That is not the norm unless you're at an expensive private school or already in the upper middle class or something.

If you aren't careful though, the tracks can also continue. At BigCorp they have lots of titles to create a sense of urgency and box-ticking to progress from A to B to C to..

Interesting, too, how many institutions are very willing to jump in and put you back on an endless subway train. e.g. graduate school, postdoc, junior faculty, assistant professor, full professor...the ride never ends!

The first bit is too similar to what a typical college kid would go through in India.

My assumption was that this would NOT be the case in the USA. You hear about kids dropping out and starting startups, or people just skipping college to work on what they like, or kids joining trade schools to get into welding.

Isn't this the norm in the USA / most of the developed world ?? Your comment confirms the same thing.. you dropped out..That's all I read and see everywhere about America, that you are free to take decisions like this (and often encouraged)

It feels odd to think to that kids in the USA are on a somewhat fixed train track, when there are so many opportunities + freedom + less judgement overall in the society.

The kids that fall into this bucket talk about it a lot (when they’re successful). The vast majority of successful people in America (for some definition of success) did not drop out, and the vast majority of drop outs do not find this type of mainstream success.

This is not to say that dropouts without that kind of success aren’t happy. I do believe that America does afford a lot of leeway for people to be happy and comfortable in non-traditional life paths. They’re just not the ones being discussed din this comment.

Dropping out is so “Silicon Valley” that the first episode of Silicon valley starts with a billionaire encouraging youths to drop out, and a kid successfully raising funding from him by touching him to his core: “If I don’t raise funding, I might… go to uni”. It’s a joke on SV.

What’s your point?

Peter Thiel and the people that did his fellowship don’t represent the majority of career paths people take in SV, but they do make for good (or too close to home) fodder.

The lifetime value of a college degree in the United States is very high.

College is expensive, but it's nowhere near as expensive as the high private university tuitions you read about ($200K+). Most people have access to state universities that are much cheaper. Even at private universities most students are on sliding scale payments with scholarships. It's common for 10-20% or more of a university's students to be paying effectively $0 tuition.

While you definitely can skip college and still have a good career, the trades never really pay as well as internet lore suggests and the number of people who start startups and succeed is very small.

It's a relatively small percentage that want to do something outside the norm, and it does not go very well for a lot of them. There's a lot of survivor's bias in hearing about dropouts.

I think it is easier and more obvious for kids from poorer families to figure it out they need to look around and try hard to earn some money. Do you need a laptop? Well you better earn some money to get one. Kids that get everything provided by parents often end up hopelessly lost when time to become independent comes.

And yet so many of them kinda rule the world by running the biggest corporations in the world. Your argument has so many holds, it can't hold water.

> And yet so many of them kinda rule the world by running the biggest corporations in the world.

Have you looked at the state of the world recently?

I don’t see your point. When has the state of the world ever been ever been good?

They used to rule the world when its state was better too. In fact, their proportion was higher.

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.

So I graduate, I call him up long distance, I say "Dad, now what?" He says, "Get a job."

Now I'm 25, make my yearly call again. I say Dad, "Now what?" He says, "I don't know, get married."

Final sentence:

> Find the interesting people.

Note that this isn't advice for everyone. Go back to earlier in the piece:

> But in the middle, there's a group who wish they had ambitious plans, but don't. This speech is for you. I'm going to tell you how to get ambitious plans.

The "Find Your People" of the title is the more general advice, for a larger audience.

Your people might well be a quiet small town environment that's doing OK economically, has good school(s) for children, people are neighborly and supportive, not a lot of inequity and all that follows, etc.

You might not think of that as interesting, at least not in the abstract, but it might be your people.

For myself, who seems to be a natural startup person (maybe including a little bit of both Swartz and Altman), I've been thinking that I'm most likely to find a concentration of my people in a town with a good liberal arts college, intermixed with economically OK non-college people, and easily accessible to a major metro area -- without feeling cut off too much from activity and opportunity, and with having a regular infusion of a little freshness/change.

(I'm not convinced that Cambridge/Boston, San Francisco, or NYC can be that place, long-term, unless you have enough money to insulate yourself from the VHCOLA downsides. And then maybe you end up mostly only associating with people who also have enough money to be sufficiently insulated, which isn't the complete breakfast.)

It'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.

I find myself in the former position more than ever. Feeling kinda trapped... it's what my parents and their parents did before me. Not sure how to break out? It becomes much harder to take risks once you have an entire family to take care of.

Just gotta compare it to the risks of not having a family to take care of.

If you don’t succeed enough, most men experience that the wife drops us.

You must take those risks. And if you fail, they will be no-one for you. We try to hide this to teens because it’s a raw deal, but generations before us were sent to war without much thought either.

You must succeed at life above the others, or there will be no family thing. At each generation, 30% of males don’t reproduce at all, and there is no plaque for them, no memorial, people simply won’t talk about you.

Do a startup and do not fail, you do not have a real choice here.

I kinda like the speech but she was also super lucky to be in the right place at the right time - advice is possibly still relevant but I dont see any bright spot for new grads to go to.

If you saw the bright spot easy enough from an outsiders perspective it would be oversaturated already.

Truth is nowadays it’s really about networking however messed up that might be. Inherently that’s pretty luck based but it’s a near guarantee to bring you _something_ as long as you don’t give up.

Thanks for writing this, Jessica.

This is a great paragraph:

> If you want to, you can just decide to shift gears at this point, and no one's going to tell you you can't. You can just decide to be more curious, or more responsible, or more energetic, and no one's going to go look up your college grades and say, "Hey, wait a minute, this person's supposed to be a slacker."

I've often seen people get too attached to an unproductive "identity" instead of looking at things as they are. It's way too common for people to fail once and think they're a failure, rather than thinking that they just failed at that particular time.

By the way, I remember meeting you during the S23 batch and how genuinely excited you were to meet us, young founders who were just getting started. It does seem like you found your people!

“I would have liked to work hard on something I cared about. But I didn't have anything I cared about”

This is one of those sentences that make me jealous I didn’t write it. Just such a perfect description of early adulthood for many.

I channeled most of my energy into playing MMOs in the early 2000s, I have some wonderful memories but it fried my dopamine reward system and it took me more than a decade to wean myself off of the bad habit.

Not having something real and tangible to care about can be devastating.

> 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

Some rhythm of starting and efforting and finishing and relaxing, before starting the next cycle.

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.

Underrated impact of good networking is that it increases the expectations you have for yourself and the potential you ascribe to yourself.

My first job after finishing college was in a factory. After many more years of drifting, I finally had the dumb luck to start encountering people doing intellectually engaging things and actually making good money.

When I started surrounding myself with those individuals, I started realizing I was underselling my capabilities. And I started having higher expectations of what I wanted to achieve in specific domains.

I am definitely not successful by the standards of the corporate world, but I've superseded what my prospects should have been based on my track record in my 20's. And almost all of that started by rubbing shoulders with people in stages of life that I never considered before.

> Up to this point in life, most of you have been rolling on train tracks. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college [...] And there are some jobs where you can make it stay like train tracks if you want

I've never envied the people who graduate college and then immediately go to work at big tech companies where they start off as an "SDE 1", then "SDE 2", then Mid level, senior, staff, principal, etc. There's definitely more security and stability in that, but I think these people are also missing out on a lot.

It does not matter. Everyone is a code whore. You will work at a place which pays you the highest, regardless of the ethics. Majority of "big tech" are unethical places and yet people will sell their souls to work there. Tells you a lot about the majority of CS grads

Every time I'm assisting those Ama/MS/Apple labels for their rate race I want to cringe so hard to be honest.

Startups might be the new SDE1 while trying to do stuff outside of capitalism might be the new startup.

Not in terms of financial reward of course. But in terms of rewarding career off the beaten path.

Personally while I want to do a startup I am finding the boring path you mention quite fascinating!

How much of that is hindsight? Was she drawn to Y-combinator or did she drift into it like she did Fidelity? Recognizing it was the right people and the right thing obviously happened, I'm just questioning when she actually knew that.

She co-founded it, didn’t she? Created it to operationalize her ideas, which, from the sound of her speech, confused people around her at the time? Or am I misunderstanding what you’re asking?

> When we started Y Combinator, everyone treated it as a joke. We were funding kids right out of college and only giving them small amounts of money. How could these startups ever succeed? Now everyone knows it's a good idea to fund young founders, but twenty years ago, it just seemed lame. But we didn't care what people thought of us. We knew we were onto something. In fact it was good that we seemed lame, because that meant it took several years before people started to copy us.

I don’t know about her but when I found what I really actually liked, I looked forward it every day, no matter what challenge it gave me.

And it’s still the same excitement every day 5, 10, etc. years later.

I suppose I’m saying is that when you find it, you know.

"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 destruction in their wake. I don't care if you need this attitude to be a founder, it still sucks.

I worked at a startup where the technical founder had this attitude and was, at least with respect to the product at hand, totally incompetent and it was truly catastrophically absurd and stressful and a huge waste of tons of people's time and money.

> 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].

On the flip side, there's a lot of founders who... have more determination than experience, let's say, and when told their idea won't work, instead of using factual data points (or getting an MVP out to collect data points) operate purely on belief until they run out of money.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

"Each time you have to make a decision, make the right one" would be what I would say in a commencement speech. Truly sage advice.

> "Each time you have to make a decision, make the right one" would be what I would say in a commencement speech. Truly sage advice.

It honestly is great advice. Most (useful) business advice I've seen amounts to "how to make better decisions". This includes things like doing market research or a business model canvas (to make better decisions about your customers), releasing MVPs quickly to test the market (to make better decisions around product and pricing), picking which metrics and data points to measure (so that you can evaluate if your decision was actually correct and quickly course correct if not), etc.

Each time you have to make a decision, measure.

> 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.

"Immune to rejection" and "consider all criticism" are both useful but much, much harder than doing one or the other reliably. Lots of assholes are immune to rejection and a lot of doormats consider all criticism. Doing both means you keep your ears open but are resolute (and maybe delusional) about a few core ideals. And maybe even those change with criticism.

There is a reason you see lots of asshole business owners and not many doormats, though - you need to filter criticism or it will always screw you up in the end. Accepting criticism can help you course-correct and produce better/happier, but isn't a requirement for success.

I like the subway analogy. I'm sure I've heard some version of it before, but maybe because I was younger I didn't really get it. It really is a little strange to tell kids who have never really directed their own lives before to start doing it all of a sudden.

There is a bit of a transition period; you have a lot more choice about what classes you're going to take in college than prior to that for example, and you're to a large degree choosing your own path there. But graduating is still the end of a structured path that you've been in nearly your whole life, so I think it's always going to feel pretty abrupt subjectively despite the fact that you have been acclimated a little bit over time.

Watching the speech, had a flashback to early 1986 when I was trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do now that I had graduated from college. In addition to what Jessica talked about, I left school a semester early having earned enough credits. I was quite off-balance, didn't have any peer support or friendship.

I moved in with my parents and I'm grateful for that. But they were not helpful in any way with helping me think through what was next for me. As I've said here before, it was a long road of mental health and drinking challenges and I finally got it together enough to have a direction somewhere.

As I reread this, I recognize how whiny this privileged white girl (!!!) sounds. But I also know that my not-so-great experiences got me where I am and I desperately want more for my grandkids and hope that I can be what they need me to be for them.

Refreshingly unpretentious and clear. Love it, thank you

I agree with this so much.

You really do need to treat your friends as a revolving/evolving Rolodex.

Get rid of “friends”/people who hold you back. Their problems are not your problems. You have your own goal in life. They can deal with their own problems, and maturity is realizing it’s up to the individual to change.

Get friends in your life who add value to your life. These will be hard to find, but once you have such friends they are friends for life. These are people who are riding the same wave as you, who yearn for better waves. They love the sport of life.

I don’t talk to anyone I went to college with because I realized they’re not on the same wavelength. I’m not interested in cruising through life. They didn’t really add value to my life, and I didn’t want to be bored or annoyed. I’m talking nihilistic people who are ok with just status quo. Yuck!

The friends I’ve made since have improved my life. They’ve shown me how to really make the most out of life. Challenging myself to be better, and they’re smarter than me which is encouraging as well.

I have maybe a dozen close friends. I’m glad that I’m one of their close friends too.

Sorry if I sounded harsh ESL btw.

Jessica - if you are reading the comments, I have to say - Founders at Work changed my career trajectory. I read it fresh out of college in 2008. I told a buddy to read it and it also changed his trajectory.

Guess what, after years of meandering (YC, Series A, big tech) I still come back to the moment I first discovered your book.

Also, please tell PG, I knew about your book before I knew what YC was :-)

If your country allows it and you can afford it, I recommend every graduate to do a working holidays visa in another country. Embed yourself in the community. Volunteer, work odd jobs, practice art , learn a language. You'll find what you unexpectedly love and hate during that time. Following the tracks of life and getting a career out of college sounds safe and comfy, but you'll be surprised what new joys life can throw at you when you go off the beaten path a bit.

The talk is suitable for the target audience, the young undecided.

For the rest of us, especially here at HN, it would have been interesting to learn a bit more about how she got to that Fidelity job first and how she then "drifted" towards "her people", namely the startup people, and then the book and Y Combinator in specific. Some Y combinator early anecdotes would have been great, too.

I’m still processing that this is the Ycombinator cofounder. It’s not a good thing or a bad thing - although tbh it’s better this person founded Ycombinator than say, a nepo baby which is always what I had kind of assumed. But the idea that the cofounder of Ycombinator didn’t discover their ambition until after undergrad is going to take a bit for my brain to absorb.

> didn’t discover their ambition until after undergrad

I mixed with a lot of very ambitious people at university, some had a clear plan of how to exercise their ambition, not all of those plans worked as intended, many had ambition with no specific plan at that time other than to learn a breadth of useful knowledge, make good connections, take on early work with great networking potential .. and then pivot when they had a better handle on the world as it was at that time a year or three after graduation.

Ambition to succeed doesn't have to come with a specific predetermined path on how to succeed .. there's still room to adapt and morph as one moves forward.

YC is a joke. Imagine letting your company be in the hands of soul less venture capitalists who do not care anything about your "vision". They want their instant paycheck by getting you ready for an IPO. That's their goal, not to nurture you. YC is delusional and so are the people who take funding from them

I 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!'"

In my case, the subway crashed into the station at about 100mph, and I had to crawl out of the wreckage, and repair the damage, before I could proceed. When I did proceed, I had to buck constant headwinds.

Worked great. Would ride again. 10/10.

Say more.

It's a long story, and probably not one for this venue, but suffice it to say that the skills one develops, rebuilding a shattered life, tend to give significant advantages.

> That which does not kill you, makes you stronger.

- Freddy Nietzsche

> Or leaves you weak and exhausted.

- Bill Prekker's Corollary

I can relate and feel the same about myself. Disasters and dramas since young age made me quite resilient at embracing change and difficulty.

> You fall into three groups

She lost me at that statement. I hate these kind of reductive statements that are presented as a thoughtful statement. There are vastly more than three groups in that audience (granted, it is self-selected elite University, so the number of groups is still constrained comparatively).

You might as well add other categories about their majors or gender or age groups. I wouldn't call this reductive so much as a way of thinking about a group of college graduates. This classification was never presented as universal, just as a way of looking at things.

She mentions "want ambitious plans, have ambitious plans", "don't want ambitious plans, don't have ambitious plans" and "want ambitious plans, don't have ambitious plans".

What are the vast number of groups outside of that set? Of course there's "have ambitious plans, don't want ambitious plans", which would probably be more interesting than the other three, but what are the other missing groups?

I wish Jessica would write essays

It’s a lovely speech. I’m older now and can appreciate it. However, I’m not sure if I would have in my twenties. Unfortunately, some things can't be advised or taught - you have to discover them for yourself through trial and error.

Right. I feel like cultural fit is very important. You need to find the community you're most aligned with (share same memetic space) and go to them. This is why I think network states will succeed

I suspect very strongly that we live in a "post-community" world. There are no communities, and haven't been for a very long time, likely since before your grandparents were in their prime. We have any number of entities that function as surrogate communities, but without the benefits the real thing would provide. Quite often though, they have many of the disadvtanges of those, plus a few extra.

The community you're most aligned with, that you rush into hoping to feel as if you fit in, it might be more like an angler fish just waiting for you to jump into its jaws.

Well, we have it mildly solved on the internet layer (hackernews). Issue is these bonds aren't very strong because they're not supported by physical space (can't use evolutionary hardwiring). This is why I think network states are good because they're a projection of community on the internet layer onto the physical layer. I think community is very important, and the world will tend more and more towards happiness (generally speaking), so the resurgence of community living I think is inevitable. I think the atomization is a temporary blip caused by increased convenience (tiktok, amazon).

I think the characterization of a community as an angler fish has some merit but might be a little pessimistic. In any case, it's way better than interacting with people who you know are definitely not your community.

I wasn't expecting much, and I personally didn't get a lot from the article, but if I was in early 20s, I would've been hugely inspired. Jessica surely has a gift for clear and motivating writing.

As someone who has “reinvented” myself more than once (mostly due to school/job transfers), it seems what wasn’t said is equally if not more important.

Rarely can you “find your people” without letting other people go.

The unspoken truth in this article is that it’s just as important to be willing to let go of relationships that aren’t helping you grow.

Easier said than done.

Whether it’s the negative influence of a toxic friend, or the mediocre advice of an overbearing parent (who is just trying to keep you on the rails), other people rarely have your best interests in mind.

Losing the people who aren’t “your people” is (usually) a necessary step to finding the right people.

As Kermit the Frog in his Maryland commencement speech said, Jim Henson took people for "what they are":

https://www.youtube.com/live/hLFa8zGeotI?feature=shared&t=74...

Do NOT "fake it until you make it". Be yourself. And find people who accept you as you are.

This is semantic baggage to me. Identity is best loosely held, and it's mostly determined by our actions. There's no real faking, just acting in accordance to, or against, one's preferences.

Colloquially when people use the term "fake it till you make it" they don't really mean "pretend to be a different person". They just mean act in the face of uncertainty. You can do it with or without undeserved confidence, it's besides.

> or the mediocre advice of an overbearing parent

For what it's worth, I teach my students not to listen to their parents, because while most parents want the best for their children, without doubt, their assumptions are typically outdated, and were probably already wrong when they were young.

As categorical guidance, that seems like a problematic thing to teach. First, parents don’t know everything, but they know their kids and have witnessed their journey, so they have a unique perspective to offer. Second, parents will begin to (justifiably!!) grow suspicious of your institution and develop resentment, which is a serious structural problem.

Hopefully what you mean is something like you teach them to think critically about their parents advice as one input among many, understanding where the advice comes from and its inherent strengths and flaws.

My personal experience is my parents’ advice was almost universally bad. Fortunately they still supported my own decisions. I still find it frustrating talking to them about my goals/issues as their takes are extremely irrelevant to my situation

For what it's worth, I teach my children not to listen to their teachers, because while most teachers want the best for their students, without doubt, their assumptions are typically outdated, and were probably already wrong when they were young.

Yikes.

Kids not feeling like they have agency is a huge problem in the asian community which likes to put their kids on steel tracks with 0 wiggle room, this speech resonated with me big time

As a south asian person, I could not agree more.

The irony is that my parents were immigrant entrepreneurs and my grandparents were also entrepreneurs on both sides. Yet my parents pushed me towards medical school or a stable job at the least.

I think this was for a couple reasons:

1. Asian parents express their insecurities through their children. They wanted a stable and high income (which maps to "doctor") so they push their kids to become the version of them they never were.

2. Asian parents treat their children like status symbols. Nothing says "I am the best parent" than being able to say "my son/daughter is a doctor." Saying 'my son/daughter owns their own business" just does not have the same ring to it.

In asian cultures, status and conformity are very valuable, and those do not map to high agency.

Not Asian or South Asian. I'm sure what you're saying is true.

But having parents that are not involved enough to push their kids towards anything in particular is a much bigger challenge to over come.

If you have a degree from a prestigious university and the network that comes along with it, pivoting towards start ups or something more creative or entrepreneurial is a lot easier than if you never went to college at all or didn't finish high school.

On both ends here it's bad. I know several Asian kids who have permanently frayed relationships with parents because of how they felt their parents imposed their desires on their lives. The best is in the middle.

> push their kids

I think complete apathy is uncommon. Parents mostly want their kids to succeed in what would loosely map to their own definitions, to be "content" and self-reliant. If they come from a blue collar background that will mean suggesting their kids pick up a trade. Educated parents will usually suggest college.

You can't will ambition in someone else that isn't there, and it comes at a price. Some parents relentlessly make their kids train hard at sports, or studying, and they're miserable and resentful for it.

This sounds wildly similar to Brazilian parenting

It’s a spectrum. Many parents, across all countries act like this.

It tends to be associated with immigrants and parents who believe that they should have had a "better" job (even when they like what they do, they don't want their kids doing it).

Such a wake-up call to take ownership of your direction, rather than waiting for the next “station” to appear.

That was enjoyable, and I appreciated the overall message. A little bit trickier of a pitch to introverted people, maybe.

One bit though I'm interested in chatting about:

> The truth is there are thousands of different places you could go work, and you have to consider them all and figure out which is the best. But that sounds impossible, right? You only had to choose between 60 different majors, and now you have to choose between thousands of different jobs? How do you even do that? The first step, is to acknowledge that you have to.

Do you really "have" to? I guess we can relatively safely assume that basically 99% of those graduates have essentially the same life goals in terms of financial stability, retirement, etc. Lately though I've wondered about the basically unspoken premise we pitch to our kids from the get-go. I recently found a diary entry from me when I was 7 years old that had a line along the lines of, "I finally figured out what I'm gonna be when I grow up!" I noticed also that so frequently one of the first questions asked at parties or meetups is, "So what do you do for a living?" We really seem to be telling eachother that you go to school and then you do a career and that's how you define yourself, mostly. Differentiate based on hobbies you get to brag about during a "and tell us one interesting fact about yourself" portion of an icebreaker.

I have a friend here that teaches English about 15 hours a week. The rest of his time he spends painting murals on the riverside (unenforced here in Taiwan, graffiti is kinda just considered public art) or drawing people he sees on trains. I asked him why he doesn't take up more hours, he replied that actually he'd work less if he could, but he needs to hit a certain minimum annual income in order to be eligible for permanent residency. Once he gets that, he'll work even less. He's one of the happiest people I know.

I've been wondering if one of the responses to late stage capitalism will be more en-masse opt-outs. There's a recognized class of this in the PRC, called "Lying Flat People," or "Full Time Children," or my favorite, "Rat People." They scrounge together enough cash for a street BBQ and beers, and then spend their day just lounging, drinking, smoking, and bbqing. In Taiwan we have "Moonlight Tribe," people who spend all their money the second they get their paycheck and then live penny to penny until the end of the month. I'm guessing other countries have similar movements - I remember meeting vagabonds (their self-description) in New Orleans that were happily living a "post-capitalism" life.

It's maybe short-sighted since it basically guarantees you will die younger than most, but then again none of us are guaranteed to make it to retirement anyway so I can also respect the choice.

You may die younger but is slaving away in an office to make money for someone else for most of your waking hours really living?

What if you happily work in a low-stress office, enjoying what you do and with whom you do it, and are satisfied with your compensation?

There are definitely healthy middle grounds available as life choices.

Nope. I keep getting told "career limiting" like that's a bad thing. I'm good, it keeps wanting more. It mirrors that thing about food: "eat to live or live to eat"

edit: Despite now making 5x my first salary, I still feel my situation; less than Serfdom. For the same outcome... there are easier/more rewarding paths.

Under this light, with capital for a house I'll never afford sitting in the bank, less-than-mainstream options start to look more appealing. To borrow a term I've learned in this supposedly-fanciful Up-or-Out corporate life: my 'blockers' are legality/morality and... I wasn't born in [or relocated to/kept in] the right ZIP code.

Good speech. It makes me think of why the rich get richer though. More access to more types of people earlier and throughout one's life.

The best thing to give kids is access to a very wide—as wide as they can stomach—orientation of all there is in the world. It's not curation, it's not "the best". it's volume and contrasts.

I debate my friends about private school. they have kids, I don't yet. Private school is actually a narrow lens, is my argument.

I mostly agree with you, as a person who went to a middle-of-the-road public school.

I will point out though, anecdotally, my spouse went to the highest tier of public school in our city. She has a good balance of "seeing the world for what it is" while also having an edge of being personally networked to a ton of folks who are rich, well-connected, and capable.

I look at the friend groups I built when I was a kid, and then I look at hers.

- My old friend groups are all stuck in a range of poverty to lower-middle-class.

- My spouses friends are all doing very well for themselves, live all over the world, prestigious careers, active hobbies, highly intellectual, cultured, etc.

It's a stark contrast.

There is something to be said for ensuring your kids go to the best schools possible. Those early networks are pivotal in forming an above average life.

Competency is secondary to connection.

I went to a poverty level school, my partner went to one of the most elite schools in the US. My friends are also stuck in poverty or the lower-middle-class while my partner's friends seem quite conventionally successful. But several of my partner's friends are quite frustrated with their career choices. They feel like they were hemmed into high-prestige careers. A lot of them are not particularly successful in their careers because they don't feel the passion to succeed and feel like their choices were taken away from them. Many of them have very anxious memories from school of perpetually feeling like they were failing because of the high pressure of the school.

There are many aspects of my low-income schooling I would not want to pass onto a child but there are also aspects of my partner's schooling that I wouldn't want to pass either. I don't really know what the answer is, but I feel like being at either end of the normal distribution of schools here isn't good.

It’s certainly true that there are real downsides to both ends of the spectrum — but all things being equal I’d rather be wiping my tears with hundred dollar bills than tissues

You say that, until you start spending those hundred dollar bills on therapy. I'm only being a bit silly here, a pretty high number of these folks are in therapy dealing with the alienation they feel over their life for being forced into a career path they felt like they had no choice in.

I mean, at some point this is a way-too-abstract point with no real answer

But being in therapy and alienated from your life, but rich, is not comparable to being actually poor, to not being able to provide for the people you love, to not being able to meet your basic needs. I’m sorry, but it’s just not.

Let alone the fact that, trust me, lots of poorer people are alienated from their jobs/lifestyle too! They just can’t afford the therapy!

Like I said earlier: "I don't really know what the answer is, but I feel like being at either end of the normal distribution of schools here isn't good."

This is too easily a soundbite. Sounds good so people say it.

It's only true at the extreme ends though. Reliable access to food and shelter is a prerequisite so let's get that out of the way.

I do worry that "rich people problems" are in ways worse problems to have. They're sinister and they cut deep. People become utility functions. Inability to form or even understand authentic relationships. Hamster wheel of self-worth being tied to capitalistic productivity: also paradoxically management hijinks . Existential crises. Law of diminishing returns. There was a post about what the rich have access to that others don't. Takeaway was actually not much, not in physical goods at least.

Stuff like that.

> There is something to be said for ensuring your kids go to the best schools possible. Those early networks are pivotal in forming an above average life.

I think this might be more of an American thing tbh. Having early networks can help grease the wheels for an above average life maybe but it's not so straightforward.

Personally, I went to an average public high school, I went to a small university (~9k students), and I'm now one of the top 3% of earners in my country just shy of a decade after graduating

I didn't wind up keeping in touch with anyone I went to any of my schooling with, honestly. I had to move away from my hometown to find opportunities so those bonds faded

It hasn't been easy for sure, it would definitely help to have that embedded network from childhood, but I don't think that is a requirement

Being competent and working hard can get you a long way

Having thought about this a good amount and collected anecdotes over the years... I think the prioritization order should be (1) live in a location in which the parents feel their most authentic/happy/self-actualized selves, (2) send your children to the most geographically proximate school where they won't be (overly-)bullied for their identity (inclusive of class) one way or another.

Relative school quality (performance on standardized tests, admissions to fancy schools), and public/private are proxies for these more fundamental issues. Too many parents discount the value of (1) to zero, with the idea that they're "sacrificing themselves" "for their kids".

An example of one good reason to not send your kids to private school: Burning yourself out on a series of high-stress job to afford sending your middle-class kid to an upper-class private school will traumatize them. If not for their education/social experience at school, then for your lack of calming and positive influence on their emotional/relationship-forming lives.

I don't think it's necessarily "wrong" for some people to send their kids to a "narrow-lens" school, even if it's often wrong. It can be right for somebody else and wrong for you.

I think this is an excellent comment. Not enough people talk about living near other parents in this way, and you’re right that it’s a massive difference-maker.

Aside from the pure “networking” factor, the expectations/environment are a big deal too

I went to private school and in hindsight it pretty obviously altered my life for the better — I was a smart but lazy kid, and being surrounded by people who were dead-set on going to Harvard, and by teachers who expected excellence, was a huge factor in making me actually try hard.

If I was a smart lazy kid at a school where I had to try to find that environment, rather than being thrust into it, I would have had a much lower trajectory.

I was that other kid. Grew up in a pretty tough place, where dodging blades was no euphemism and emotional regulation was on permanent hiatus. Grew up with severe issues in personal life and balance of self, absence of anchors in family and social relationships. Was always curious, always loved understanding things.

When you don't have good people around, you pay the price in time and pain. Those people will save you years and hundreds of thousands - or even millions, simply by showing you the most egregious traps to avoid and the more virtuous behaviours to adopt. They'll make your success more predictable, less reliant on the specifics of your genetic makeup, domestic instability, and odd moments of luck.

I was a good kid. Didn't end up well at all. Figured I could at least try to be a good person to others as time goes on, and pass on the gotchas and virtuous habits I partly figured out myself.

I don't know what the axes are for your trajectory plot, but some of the people I know who seem to really enjoy their lives are not high achievers if you measure by status or finances.

It's hard to find things that all of them have in common. They all come from supportive, functioning families and all of them are artistic people working in technical fields and have high EQ. They are all very curious but not scattered or unfocused.

I didn't know if I should write creative or artistic above because they are so similar. They are different though, right?

> They all come from supportive, functioning families and all of them are artistic people working in technical fields and have high EQ. They are all very curious but not scattered or unfocused.

Seems like it wasn't too hard to find things all of them have in common.

Yeah, rereading my comment I don’t think I said what I wanted to say. It wasn’t very insightful.

Environmental expectations and accountability is a great point. Hard to deny how wide the gap can be between various groups.

Agree that a wide diversity of people is great. Disagree on the private school - it is a narrow band, but so is public school. I think ppl overestimate the diversity in public school and underestimate it in private school.

Neither is enough - def need to find ways to expand kids network, especially the network of adults they know.

A wide perspective is good, but that is orthogonal to what they experience as normal. You can select for a good, healthy normal AND provide a wide experience.

Your child doesn’t have to attend a school where educational attainment isn’t valued, to understand that perspective exists.

Their “normal” will strongly influence their choices. For example, if you wanted your child to attend college, I would argue the single best way to ensure they do is to enroll them in a high school where 90%+ of the student body later goes on to college.

> The best thing to give kids is access to a very wide—as wide as they can stomach—orientation of all there is in the world.

This sounds good sure, but what if you give your child a wide orientation and they want to be an influencer, or club promoter, or grind it out in acting? They almost certainly won't want to become an accountant or nurse. Who would want to do that by choice?

But maybe an accountant or nurse is the path to a good life. The extreme is celebrity children which often have issues.

I think its good to have restraints. If you have an infinite bank roll and no real forcing function, you're likely to get lost

> I think its good to have restraints. If you have an infinite bank roll and no real forcing function, you're likely to get lost

You're absolutely right

I wonder how many people graduate from prestigious universities, well connected and set up to succeed, and then don't ever really make anything of themselves

I don't think anybody would argue that it's a narrower lens than public school, the argument is that it's better. Not just academically, although that's the case 99 times out of 100. But as you alluded to yourself in this very comment, the kids at private schools get access to other kids (and families) at that private school.

With respect to private schools, I’m not necessarily against them, but I hate the idea of living in a society where public schools are seen as the ‘bad’ option for the lower class while private schools are for the middle and upper class.

I’ve heard that it’s kinda like that in the US currently but I’m not actually sure. I went to public school in Canada and it was completely fine.

As someone who wishes they could realistically afford private school for their kids (public school leaves a lot to be desired for 'gifted' kids these days), I think you've got good points but I land on the other side. Using some of your quotes: private school is "a narrow lens", but that lens likely includes a high percentage of the "rich get richer" network. I think my ideal would be private school to help find a better match for my kids' brainpower (2 of them anyway, tbd on #3 :D) and make some good high-value connections, but still make a conscious effort to encourage them to interact with a wider variety of people (through travel, public sports teams, community service, etc.)

> (2 of them anyway, tbd on #3 :D)

LOL; thanks this made my chill Friday very chill.

On principle, I don't like feeding into wealth disparity so I don't want to pay for private school. Your perspective is most practical and likely something I'll lean into as I do have kids of my own. "Why not do both" basically.

I think its important to think about this point in the context that Jessica attended one of the most elite private schools in the US, Phillips Academy, with an annual tuition that is currently ~60kUSD/year. Notable alumni include both Bush presidents, and many billionaires or their children. Afterwards she attended Bucknell University, another private elite institution, tuition ~65kUSD/year, where the median family income is > 200kUSD/year, and 73% of the student body is from the top 20% income bracket.

So its important to "find your people", but as always it's as important to situate advice in the context where the advice-giver issues it from, and in this case Jessica has spent her entire life as an elite, finding other elites in elite circles, and I'm going to hazard a guess that this is probably something that has had a positive impact on her life.

I think your friends are probably on to something, realizing that you're responsible for helping to guide your child as they grow up has a way of crystalizing certain arguments, and various "hypotheticals" fall by the wayside as the attraction of an intellectual experiment and being the devil's advocate just doesn't really have the same pull anymore once it's your own child's future at stake and not just some thought experiment about "volumes and contrasts". As always people are free to make their own choices, and even listen to a speech from someone who was able have almost $200,000 of money spent on their high-school education, a speech about how to plan your career that is big on "gumption" and "stick to it" energy, and surprisingly short on "be born in the top 1% of economic circles", but given that this is a speech at the aforementioned Bucknell, I am pretty sure that most of the crowd is already pretty hip to the realities of the world they're about to enter.

Kudos jessica. You are still the same unstoppable machine from long ago. Even now you are selling and recruiting, and even passed all opportunity to gloat. all business.

Finding your people a theme in Kermit the Frog's speech over at UMD

https://apnews.com/article/kermit-frog-university-of-marylan... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44075293)

agency! very timely

"And if you find yourself working at a place where you don't like the people, get out"

Unrelated to tech, but I wonder if this is why so many people seek the IB to PE to HF route that seems so well trod. They just need rails that point them to the next stop.

Care to explain what IB, PE, and HF mean?

I think they refer to: IB - investment banking PE - private equity HF - hedge funds or High Frequency trading (?)

investment banking, private equity, hedge fund. I think

IB: Investment Banking PE: Private Equity HF: Hedge Fund

such a timely advice

It’s a great speech, but I’ve listened to this “chase your dream” thing for decades. I took career and personality tests but nothing in them fit. I don’t fit. I’ve gotten seriously jaded and live with crippling mental health problems and constant stress because I feel like I failed to find my people and now I just hide from my people.

So, as an older adult, I think maybe we need to be teaching more responsibility to kids today rather than this Disney fantasy. If people just focus on trying to do the best they can, that’s good enough. And spend that extra time improving your home, volunteering, and working on your finances like people did in the mid-to-late 20th century.

I generally agree but strictly speaking I don't think this was yet another canned "chase-your-dream" speech. She went out of her way to elucidate who this was for, and it's ambitious people that are aimlessly coasting.

When you're young, particularly in tech, taking some swings (like with a startup) and not succeeding isn't a long-term detriment. It's a good experience that can help you land other jobs in the worst case.

Which is to say, not all dream-chasing is created equal. If you want to play music, then you need to do a cost-benefit analysis: you will probably not sustain yourself very long, will probably want a dayjob and/or an out at some point, and this is an opportunity cost vs early career traction. If one's ambition only begins and ends with that, then it won't matter so much if what you end up with is "just a job" with lower income potential. All depends on what you're ok with.

The common anecdote is trying to make the big leagues. But consider another: some elite athletes train for years ahead of the Olympics, and then it's all over and they never do it again (most often). Are they screwed? Well it arguably demonstrates discipline and grit and might look impressive on a resume. The lives of ex-Olympians go on. By the same token, someone who never makes the NBA or whatever can get a scholarship ride anyway (which compared to the cost of lifelong training, might be a small victory).

Sometimes optimizing for the early career/education ladder-jumping isn't the "correct" move. But I think it's important that young people understand what's probably at stake

I came here to leave a comment related to this. This article has great advice, if you're normal enough that enough of "your people" exist to be able to find them and do something together.

But if you've spent your whole life being told by the whole world--even people you thought were really interesting and wanted to get to know--that you're "just too fucking weird," it lands more like, "Oh. More advice for other people."

Similarly, if you're a person who likes all kinds of things--but only for 6 weeks to 6 months and then becomes utterly bored of them--there is no stable group of "your people." There's just "these people, for now, I guess," and you hold them lightly because you know in a matter of months, when you don't share the passion for the one thing they're stably obsessed with, you won't have enough in common anymore for them to tolerate you.

I'm almost 40. I'm really at a decision point where I have to decide if I want to keep working on my underlying trauma wounds, in hopes that if I just work hard enough, I'll eventually break into the "fun kind of odd" category instead of "too fucking weird," and blend in enough to have "people," or whether I want to own that this is just how I am, and there's nothing to be done about it, so I should really do what I can to appreciate the fleeting tolerance of "people who don't know me very well yet" while it lasts, but invest most of my energy in trying to figure out if there's any way to be both happy and lonely.

> Similarly, if you're a person who likes all kinds of things--but only for 6 weeks to 6 months and then becomes utterly bored of them--there is no stable group of "your people." There's just "these people, for now, I guess," and you hold them lightly because you know in a matter of months, when you don't share the passion for the one thing they're stably obsessed with, you won't have enough in common anymore for them to tolerate you.

My lord this cuts deep. Bonus points if you approach your interests in a way that nobody else seems to, leaving you feeling even more disconnected and alone when you're around people who share them.

I've been wrestling with this since (dropping out of) high school, I'm in my early 20s now. I lean towards embracing my idiosyncrasies and letting go of attachment towards getting the kind of social fulfillment I want. Ask me on a different day, though, and the siren's call of having a 'people' is too strong to pass up.

I like to think that learning to just be authentic to myself leads to both in the long run - if I can find a way to be okay with being alone, I'll be in a better place to reach out when the time comes. Still working on the first part of that hypothesis though.

Would you be interested in chatting more about this sometime? Shoot me an email, sheyaway at outlook.

It sounds like you need some friends in the maker space or something similar where tinkering in something temporary is normal. I'd say you're among friends in the HN space where tinkerers are more common!

Keep working on your trauma. Don't however think that your healing is a requirement to have friends, love, etc. We are all broken and hurt. We are broken together.

I've tried a couple times, but the interest in making physical things cycles through just like any other interest. Then it gets replaced by something like neurobiology or anthropology and I don't want to make things for awhile.

It seems like I really enjoy the beginnings of things, like if we run Pareto ratios twice, I like the 4% of the learning that gets me 64% of the understanding. And then it's enough and I'm done. It's enough to ask questions of the interesting people without sounding like a total n00b.

In the time it would take to master one thing, I become "barely proficient" in 25, but it's hard to build anything meaningful, including human connections, operating like that.

I know healing isn't a requirement to deserve the friendship of others. But if I keep operating like this because of it, it's definitely an impediment to building those friendships.

Sounds familiar. Have you looked into ADHD and Autism yet?

Yeah, but the other symptoms don't line up. Screenings I've had have been negative.

It seems more likely that I have complex trauma from gestation, birth, infancy, and early childhood that really threw a monkeywrench into my neurological development. What we're trying to figure out now is whether I have enough neuroplasticity left at this stage for it to be recoverable, or if I'm just going to be like this forever. I'm definitely not neurologically typical, but I'm also not neurodivergent in a well-established category.

It does seem like there comes a point, though, where it's worth throwing in the towel on attempting to get "better" and just learning to make the most of what is.

Passion is just a buzzword. I much rather prefer Cal Newport's notions on work and success: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/so-good-they-cant-ignore-yo...

There seem to be a very small chance of changing one’s life trajectory after hearing these speeches. As it’s difficult to change a persons track they’ve been on for years. The uncomfortable changes you must enact immediately is difficult. None the less, a small conversion is huge.

One single speech might not do it. However, a short anecdote. Several years ago, while sitting through a training on first aid and cpr on infants, I was bored out of my mind and complaining internally about how this was a waste of time, yet another rehash of common sense. When suddenly it hit me - no, this was not common sense. I had been taught these things repeatedly ever since I was twelve. I didn’t retain all of it after the first time, the second, or the third. But eventually, it was just common sense to me. I couldn’t always tell you where I learned it, or describe the textbook medical guidance. Why is it done precisely this way, who knows, but obviously this exact grip is how you hold the infant while delivering back blows.

> So I'm going to tell you about a trick you can pull right here at the point where the train tracks end. You can reinvent yourself. I wish I’d known I could do that. I was lazy in college and got bad grades

I googled study fees for that university. $69000 per year plus expenses for accommodation, food and books.

After you finish such school, you should be top level motivated professional with highly lucrative job lined up. If you drop quarter of million dollars for paper, just to discover at end you need to "reinvent yourself", you are probably highly highly privileged person, or just not so smart.

18 years old kids need to hear this speech. Not students before graduation!

The main "trick" here was moving to where the next center of power was going to be and meeting the right people through hard work (but really the main differentiator) sheer luck.

I 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 graduating today?

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. When we graduated, you could actually get an entry level job in an office as a generic English major. You were generally competing with others in your local area or state, not the entire world's best. You could spam a bunch of resumes out and count on a handful of interviews and a few offers. You had at least a little assurance that if you did a good job, you'd advance or job-hop your way to something better. Back then, your student debt was (usually) manageable post-graduation and not a ball and chain holding you back. With a little diligent saving, you had a shot at affording a home and getting on the real estate ladder. And, you could do all these things as a B or C student, without being the world's foremost expert in your field.

I don't think any of these are true anymore. Graduates today are entering a dog eat dog capitalist slugfest where a lucky few winners take all. They're graduating into relative poverty and crushing debt, with no realistic opportunity to save. The job prospects for people without experience are generally awful. You're up against the world's best, plus a growing number of privileged elite "sons of the right people" sponging up all the really good jobs. Crappy work as a temp worker if you're lucky, stocking shelves or waiting tables if you're not. Good luck finding an actual full-time office gig related to your degree, unless you're top of your class. And even if you do, you're under constant threat of PIP, downsizing, or AI taking your place. "Find the people that you think are interesting" is kind of tone deaf happy-talk in today's reality.

> 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 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. And yes it was hard but I survived - I could have made smarter decisions to make it easier, I could have made worse decisions and ended up a barista in my late 30s. On a systemic level it might be harder now, it might not be. But they will survive as all previous generations have and will continue to.

There seems to be a bimodal distribution in people 20-30 years post-college discussing today's graduates. It's either "these kids are so lazy noboDY wAntS To WorK ANYMore just have a firm handshake" nonsense, or "these children will be wage slaves forever and it is undeniably the fault of capitalism/AI/Musk/whatever boogeyman."

I think it was hard when I started out. I think it's probably a little harder now. That doesn't mean it's any more of a "dog eat dog capitalist slugfest" than it was 10, 20, 30 years prior.

> 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?

How about you actually go to today's college environments and talk to young people of this generation first? Look at how their life is, and what trends are affecting them firsthand? Would be much better than making wild declarations out of nowhere.

> today are entering a dog eat dog capitalist slugfest where a lucky few winners take all.

If you believe that to be true, perhaps it might be worth trying to become one of the few lucky winners.

Or come on, learn some Python and take the second prize with a six digit salary in a corporation, private health insurance and benefits plan.

This is the kind of comment that the newest HN guideline is designed to discourage:

"Don't be curmudgeonly." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What counts as being curmudgeonly? Here's one heuristic: if a comment is flying close to the planet "Everything is worse than it used to be," then it probably is.

There's also this one, btw: "Please don't fulminate." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Well, that one's news to me, thanks for pointing it out. Huh. I feel... mildly targeted, actually! We only want positive thoughts now, I guess.

I changed my mind. The speech is great. New graduates should totally listen to it and follow it's extremely relevant advice.

> We only want positive thoughts now, I guess.

Not so! Check out the next sentence: "Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm sorry you felt targeted and promise you it's nothing personal. It's that we're trying for curious conversation, which the rigid-and-generic sort of negativity annihilates. There's not much room for curious response when a comment insists that the world is nothing but a "dog eat dog slugfest".

Btw, I believe that the deeper problem is that it's hard to tell how one's comments are going to come across. Most people underestimate the negativity they're contributing by a good 10x or so, which leads to quite a skew in perception. That could explain, for example, why you felt like I must be telling you to only do happytalk.

OK. The tribe has spoken. No more gloom and doom. I suppose there are other message boards for that. I appreciate the intentional and purposeful moderation here, even if I sometimes strongly disagree with the intent behind it.

I think the more accurate conclusion would be 'make your doom and gloom more interesting'. You can beat just about any of the local rules with interestingness, people do it all the time.

Also: the “find your people” advice would be far more helpful at the beginning of college so you can maximize the various high-leverage opportunities around you.

What would you tell the graduating students?

Tangential to this but why does there seem to be a correlation between rock climbing gyms and tech oriented people?

I have no idea, but personally after 30 years of IT work, I definitely regret not finding something to strengthen my hands. They're barely useful for anything besides typing, and often not even that.

I don’t know, but I’ve made a specific effort not to rock climb because I felt it may cause long term hand related injuries which could impact my ability to work.

Not even sure how well founded that fear is, but I would otherwise love to do rock climbing.

I believe the hand injuries would be most felt if you were climbing very difficult "crimpy" climbs multiple times a week without enough rest, these are the climbs where you really put stress on tiny individual parts of the fingers to grip onto very tiny holds, otherwise "juggy" climbing where you can grab onto a hold with a large portion of your hand uses more shoulder and back muscles which can get fatigued but definitely not as damaged as tiny individual parts of the fingers

Hmm ok. What she's arguing for is "fake it till you make it". Think about it, the first thing this person did when she started steering, was write a book about startups even though by her own admission she didn't know anything about startups.

I liked the rails/steering advise, disliked the fake it till you make it advice.

dejavu :) Here something i told my mentees 4 years ago:

searching for answers.. does not make life interesting.

search questions.. then You become interesting.

and inconvenient. To the answer-manufacturers. (whole industries and institutions are dealing with only that)

which.. by itself.. IS interesting.

Most people are either answers - pretty boring - or not even answers.. only nondescript. banal.

incredibly predictable and.. like nylon bag, you see through it but cannot get through.

Search for people-questions.

Search.

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Maybe it can help someone else too..