Paul Graham: What You’ll Wish You’d Known

Any high schooler will tell you, if they've been asked once, they've been asked a thousand times. “Well, what do you want to do with your life?”

One student found an answer to that question in the excellent Paul Graham essay, "What You’ll Wish You’d Known." He wrote about how the essay inspired him in an article entitled "What a High School Student Learned from Paul Graham." Below are a few of my own favorite passages from Graham's work.

“I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they’d seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends. Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that’s one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy.”

“The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn. Your life doesn’t have to be shaped by admissions officers. It could be shaped by your own curiosity. It is for all ambitious adults. And you don’t have to wait to start. In fact, you don’t have to wait to be an adult. There’s no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age.”

"The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn."