Get good grades, get a good job!
This post has been in my WordPress queue for a few months now. I never got around to posting it because I wanted to polish it a bit first. But after this post by The Window Manager, it reminded me of this post-in-progress, so I just decided to post it, rough edges and all.
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What a bunch of crock
“Get good grades, get a good job!”, yammered my parents, my teachers, everyone. Well, I got great grades, and by conventional measures, I have a great job. But what would have made me happy got lost in between.
For the first 20+ years of my life, following the Plan was paramount. Any deviation from this was surely the road to destitution and misery. I’m not destitute, but I don’t like the job my education prepared me for. I’ve finally seen through the well-meaning brainwashing to begin the road to recovery. It would have been easier to start this road 10 or 15 years ago. I wish I spent less time studying and more time doing, in high school and in college. But I didn’t know. And Paul Graham’s articles (1 2 3 4 5) weren’t around back then. But better now than 10 or 15 years hence though. What am I going to do? No clue. But realizing I need to do something is a start.
- Thanks for reading
- Car Buying Tips
- Automatic Millionaire, Implemented!
- Get your financial house in order before quitting your dayjob
- Carla Blazek, free from 9 to 5
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October 19th, 2005 at 11:07 am
I think that even if Paul’s essays were around back then, and you printed them out and carried them around in your pocket planning on taking action outlined within, you still would not do it.
The drive to run your own thing is not as strong when you haven’t lived the cubicle programming lifestyle in a megacorp, and before you get the megacorp gig, your parent’s suggestions are gospel…you simply don’t know any better.
Our parents’ generation worked at one firm for 50 years before retiring…they simply don’t know any better either.
October 19th, 2005 at 4:09 pm
Thanks for the link.
My “outlet” is to do more things outside of business that interest me, but it sounds like yours is to do YOUR thing IN business. Hand in there and don’t get discouraged.
October 22nd, 2005 at 8:06 pm
I found your blog through a Google search. You don’t know me, but I want to thank you for providing encouragement for my own efforts through your blog entries. I was pretty discouraged over the summer because of the amount of desk work I was doing - word processing and not even coding - boring!
Since the school year has started again, my job is a lot more fun, but I’ll always want to keep my options open. Free from 9 to 5!
dhom