https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Y0Dr9fgaLiE
So there’s some high school students here, and there’s some parents who brought their high school students. So there’s a couple of- Voluntarily, I hope. Well, or the kids brought their parents. I’m not sure which. Yeah, maybe, maybe. But what advice would you have for 18 and 19 year olds who feels that college isn’t for them? Well, it’s possible that college isn’t for you. I mean, there’s other things you can do that are productive. If you’re wondering, if you’re a high school student and you’re wondering if college is for you, one of the things I would recommend is choose as an alternative something equally or more difficult. And I would say to all of you, if you’re ever facing a decision in your life, this is kind of a good rule of thumb, because you always have to ask yourself, is this not right for me or am I just useless and lazy? And looking for an easy way out, right? Because some people are more prone to that than others. If you’re not very conscientious, for example, you’re going to be more prone to that sort of thing. But it’s good to keep yourself in check. And so maybe you’re not doing very well in your job and you think, well, I should either do better job at my job or maybe I should find a new job. And it’s hard to do better at your job. And so then you might wonder if your decision to find a new job is just an escape. But if the rule is you’ll only escape to something equally or more difficult or more challenging, let’s say, then you kind of check yourself against your own temptation. And that’s a useful thing to do. And so I would say, well, if you’re a high school kid and you don’t want to go to college because you don’t think it’s for you. Well, fair enough. Do you have a better plan? And if the answer is no, well, that’s not a very good plan. Right. It’s college or nothing. Well, go to college then, because nothing is a really bad plan. And the most miserable 40 year olds that I dealt with in my clinical practice were pursuing exactly the same. Nothing at 40. They were pursuing at 20, except they were now 40. And it’s just not that cute when you’re 40. So it’s not that cute when you’re 20, really, but it’s really not that cute when you’re 40. And so if you don’t want to go to college, you should do something else. And there’s lots of other things to do. You can go to trade school or you could go to a tech boot camp or you could go into the military or you could go get a job or or you could pursue something creative or you could generate an enterprise or you could do volunteer work. It’s like you want to have a you want to have a vision that justifies your decision not to go to college. And, you know, you could try college for a year or a semester and see how it goes. And then I would also say, even though I am somewhat and justifiably cynical about higher institutes of higher education, when I went to college and university, particularly university, because the college I went to, which was a small college, was a very good college. And most of the professors there really wanted to teach. And I learned a lot there. But at university, it was much more hit and miss. Most, a fairly high proportion of the classes were abysmally bad. They were taught by people who had no business whatsoever teaching anything to anyone, even though they might have been credible researchers. They were terrible communicators. And that was at least one class out of four. And then another at least one out of four wasn’t good for other reasons. So even when the universities weren’t corrupted to the degree they are now, if you wanted to go to university and get a good education, that was sort of on you. You know, you had to pick and choose between the professors. You had to use your head to find the elements of value. And I think that in most educational institutions, you can still do that, although. It’s not the case that you can do that at all of them. And it’s increasingly less likely that that’s the case in the humanities, I would say. But I’m not so cynical that I believe it’s impossible to go to the typical higher education institute and be careful and learn. Because there’s always the library, too, you know, and the library is full of books and books are written by great people. And you can go read the books written by great people, which is what you should be doing when you go to college anyways or going to university. And you can still do that. And the other advantage to going to college is that you buy an identity. You know, because you can say to people when they say, well, what are you doing? Which is sort of like saying, who are you? You can say I’m a student and that gives you an identity and student means I’m someone who’s made the sacrifices necessary to allow myself the freedom to determine who I want to be through a. Period of study extending over about four years, and that’s it’s not nothing to buy that identity right and to share it with other people. It gives you a walled garden to inhabit while you sort yourself out and you deprive yourself of that at your peril. So. If you don’t want to go to college, then do something as good or better. And if you can’t then go to college. Don’t sit around and do nothing. That’s a very big mistake.