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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

Chilling by the watercooler, being paid for 8 hours a day with health insurance etc. while working 2 hours a day and/or bitching about your job. Or just enjoying life after work.

These people would be as much at home in Soviet Russia as they would in today’s USA. They want more security. The EU has become the new USSR for this. Lots of protections.

It’s what people want. They don’t actually want the AI disruption. But it’s coming because their employers don’t care what they want.

However if you claim to love capitalism and hate socialism, or whatever, then get a taste of it. Go hunting in the market for clients. Go spar and learn sales skills. Build your own company and service your own clients.

Or let the employer do it for you. But then you are just like a renter, not an owner — except on the supply side of the economy. And they may rent your time… for now.

The “American Dream” btw has become about renting money from banks — to finish college, to pay the mortgage on that house, etc. But the cost of all of it has gone up much more than your grandparents. It is just indentured servitude with a choice of landlords. At the end of the day, they want you to rent the money from banks to create demand for the money, so you can work for 30 years and pay it off. But the AI will break even that social contract.

Jobs will be going down

Entrepreurship will be going up

Find your people. And in the sense of getting a team of loyal badasses together. Build something new. Use AI. Don’t let your employer tell you how to use AI or use it to replace you.

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

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.

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.

> "You have never even interned in your field??".

The article is for people who don't have a field. In some circles, this is not a concept people speak about, but I think it represents many or most people who graduate university (in the US at least). The specialized fields like doctor, lawyer, engineer etc you hear about represent a minority of students and jobs. Many or most graduates end up in some variant of the fidelity customer service job.

The world is filled with office buildings, and generic office jobs. You need a college degree to get them, and no special skills.

Blame parents, teachers etc. When I mean blame, really blame them unapologetically, I have no sympathies for them.

By the time most kids get out they're institutionalized and don't even know what they want.

It's hard to start a business with minimal life experience. All the more so a startup kind of business. There are lots of things to look for, to pay attention to - that you were carefully (?, more like randomly) sheltered from until then.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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?

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

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.

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.

Since the VC game relies on volume, it is natural for tracks like YC to have emerged.