Today college loans have passed credit card debt as the highest debt in America. Due to the way the system works, college students are essentially forced to go to educational institutions or forget about getting a job. Every college kid thinks it, "How the fuck is learning about all this random bullshit going to help me in the real world after I graduate?" I go to Amherst College, the 2nd best liberal arts college in the country and a great place to learn filled with unbelievable people, but how am I going to use "History of Western Civilization Medicine" as soon as I graduate? The answer is I won't. A prominent professor at my school told my class freshman year, "I don't care if you learn a single thing in my class. I don't care if you remember a single fact. And I don't care if you're uninterested in the material. What I do care about is that you use your brain as a muscle everyday the same as you would lift weights in the gym. Thinking is to brain as curl is to bicep. Think and your brain will get stronger. College is a place for you to learn HOW TO LEARN and not WHAT TO LEARN" ........... Mind blown. Had a teacher told me for the first time that all the stuff I had been learning was bullshit?! ..... Crazy liberals.....
If college wasn't going to teach me what to learn than I was going to teach myself. How could you know what to think about if you've never read the information to think about it properly in the first place? Ever since that day I started teaching myself new things. Looking up new stuff on the internet in business, investing, psychology, personal development, music production, religion, leadership, and the power of belief stimulated my brain more than everything else that school was teaching me. I felt myself getting smarter and my thoughts expanding, validating what this professor had said. With sophomore year coming to a close the whole reality of entering the real world starts to sink in. You're pressured to get an internship and yet most of us still don't know what the fuck we wanna do. We all follow some common path. Do I go corporate, do I work for myself, do I work in an office, do I work outside, do I work with my hands, etc .. trying to find a career is hard because unfortunately most of us believe that we could never have our dream job. The job we could do every day for free seems to escape us somewhere along our life. That thing we can do every day for free is called our passion. I realized my passion is to inspire people to be the best version of themselves. By encouraging people to be better I want to gain the respect and notariety to become someone of influence to make a change in the world. I realized no one listens to you unless you are a somebody and thats just how it is. We all have passions that we are supposed to discover in college, but instead we learn other subjects to pass the time as we figure out what we want to do and by the time we figure it out its too late and we're forced into a career that we never really wanted in the first place.
This to me is the real problem. By teaching kids how to learn instead of what to learn you are preparing them to become employees in Corporate America. They learn how to learn in college and then enter the real job as a low level employee FINALLY learning what to learn, which in this case is super convenient for the employer who essentially is the programer for this new eager brain. People wake up for fifty years of their life to an alarm clock that they hate just for the financial security it brings them. However, how many old people have looked back at their life and said, "Fuck I wish I did that instead. Damn I wish I went after my dream. Boy I lived a decent life but I could've done better". It seems like we perpetuate an unfortunate cycle of giving kids time to learn what they want to do but by the time they figure it out its time to enter the real world. Too often you hear people, "I'm just gonna work for a couple years then try something new". Well the reality of the situation is, you're most likely not. Due to life it's super convenient that you just built up a huge debt to get this college degree and now you graduate begging someone for a job. Steve Jobs said, "The second you realize that all laws, all higher forms of government, all authority figures are people of equal intelligence as you then you realize you can change the world" (slightly paraphrased). It doesn't make sense for me to run to an employer equally intelligent as me with my resume so he can look at me and say, "Rob you are worth XXX amount of dollars a year". Why would you let someone else determine your self worth? This leads me to my next and most major point and hopefully its a reality check for a lot of you. One day in the Philosophy Library I stumbled upon a text in the Socrates section called "The Human Condition". In it were these powerful words, "If you do not want to be the best of the best, If you do not want to be immortal among mortals, then you are not even human but rather an animal that lives and dies and is content with the pleasures around them". This quote (paraphrased) changed my life. Essentially, similar to a squirrel that lives and dies, many humans do the same whom are equally forgotten. If you do not become the best of the best and do something in your lifetime to give yourself longevity then you are no different from the squirrel or any other animal who just lived and died. Even your own family forgets you two generations down the road. How far back can you name your grandpas? Instead of living you chose to exist .. How unfortunate.
Now this is a hard pill to swallow because realistically most of the people reading this blog are unfortunately stuck in the rat race themselves. Its hard to get out because it takes significant effort and energy to move up economic status. The American Dream of starting your own business and following your dreams is basically nonexistent because college is just a feeder into the real world. Has anyone ever thought the crazy things that could happen if maybe we taught kids 4 years of learning how to follow their passions and build business? How to fill out a tax form? Read stock correctly and invest smartly? How to tell if someone is lying to you or not? How to build positive relationship within a staff that you have to manage? How to be a good leader? Listener? How to manage your time correctly? Maybe learn how to meditate and find yourself? The Law of Attraction? Its possible that I am just young and stupid but to me I feel like I'm learning things that won't help me in the real world and when I ask why the answer I get is, "That's just the way it is and always has been" ... Well ... that way seems pretty fucking shitty.
I implore anyone reading this to start the process of finding out what it is you really want. You only life one time on Earth before who the hell knows what happens and you deserve to live it like a king or queen. "Man is heir to all wisdom hidden within the covers of great books". In the age of information (the internet can search anything) being ignorant is a choice. The less people know, the more they think they know. The more you know, the more you realize you don't know. All knowledge is written in some text and its up to you to make the conscious decision to acquire it. Knowledge when used correctly is power and that's exactly what history has shown. If college kids are acquiring the most debt and then entering one of the worst economic situations since The Great Depression then things do not look bright for the upcoming average employee. Entrepreneurs will be the saving grace of the country. They are the ones who read the books (Millionaires have their own individual personal library of books they have read) and followed their passion and turned it into reality. They escaped the the rat race and will create jobs for people in the future. Being an entrepreneur is difficult as proven that only 1% of the world are entrepreneurs. However being an entrepreneur and working towards your passion is the most rewarding. I would rather be on the street making pennies toward my passion than making six figures in a Wall Street job that I hate working 80-100 hours a week. I know that if you follow your passion then the money will come because the hard work will be consistent attached with the desire and belief that you will succeed. If you follow the money then you lose focus of true happiness as proven by so many rich people who admit to not being happy despite having it all. I'm not some elitist who believes that if you're mediocre you are worthless, but I am attempting to write the harsh reality before you so that you can defeat it. It is totally fine to accept what life has thrown at you, but if you only life once, is it worth it to not die a legend?
