Your Life is Worth More Than Your Grades
Oh boy, you’re graduating high school soon and you’re still unsure what to do?
Life= Over
There’s many conflicting messages:
Your friends are battling for the top universities; one family member is encouraging you to take a trade like carpentry or plumbing as though they have discovered the life hack of all time; your parents are either suggesting you go to university or they are acknowledging they cannot afford the tremendous tuition bill & both of these make you feel bad; you sucked at something in school that you’re interested in but believe you won’t be accepted to college (do you apply anyway?); you may like something like art, film or sports but you’re not sure how to make money from that. The list of stressors goes on…
There’s a lot of stressful choices to choose between but it seems that most of your friends are going to college or university, so it seems like the obvious choice.
Some friends even seem like they have their life figured out at 18 (or 22) and all of them are accepted to university (trust me…they don’t)
I personally have an extremely negative view of universities but I’ll spare you from reading a 200-page essay on this matter. Rather, I want to write this to encourage those who may feel lost, insecure and confused feeling they ‘should’ go to university if they want to do anything productive in life, but their heart really isn’t into it.
Below i’ve created a chart for you to think about comparing how university can or cannot change your life with important aspects in life.
The Chart That is Never Shown
| The Good, Bad and Ugly | No University | University |
| Meet new people from all over the world | No Guarantee | ✅ |
| Are able to travel the world | ✅ | ❌ |
| Extreme Debt | ❌ | ✅ |
| Qualify for more university | ❌ | ✅ |
| Open company or bank accounts | ✅ | ✅ |
| Able to focus on generating income/invest | ✅ | ❌ |
| 4 year head start on competition | ✅ | ❌ |
| Risk upsetting parents at first (4 weeks) | ✅ | ❌ |
| Risk upsetting parents after (debt, no job) | ❌ | ✅ |
| Homework/Unwanted Lectures | ❌ | ✅ |
| Partying a lot | ❌ | ✅ |
| Develop Important Skills | Up to You | Up to You |
| Walk away with a guaranteed job | No Guarantee | No Guarantee |
| Still have a group of friends | ✅ | ✅ |
Your university woes may be especially worsened by the fact that your parents want you to go to university and you feel forced to not let them down. The reality is that parents haven’t been tracking events, trends, changes that have occurred since they’ve gone to college. In fairness to them, they were raising you, looking after their banking, maybe stuck at work or their business—why the hell should they have paid attention to what the peculiar obese professors are teaching or the fact tuition costs is rising faster than everything else?
They have missed that the university has been on a decline in terms of quality; the quality of lessons, the career prospects that follow thereafter, the cost:benefit of the situation. Heck, most universities are now safe spaces FROM ideas, rather than safe spaces to engage with those terrible, uncomfortable or “triggering” ideas. The fact of the matter is the university holds the same name and symbol but its practices have radically changed & most parents are living in the past.
Again, in fairness to your parents, when they were growing up it was generally true that university carried some benefits in life but these days are long passed. I’ve witnessed some parents take on absurd tuition debts for their children just to beat their chest that their son or daughter is going to a name-brand university. In other words, the university is a social trophy for some parents rather than an economically sound, wise allocation of their child’s time and money. “I’m such a great parent that I got my kid into Yale!” sort of thing.
In my experience, knowing a language, being able to communicate about the events in another part of the world, knowing how to cook or telling a truly unique story win more people over than a piece of laminated paper.
Okay, so what should you do? Goof off? Tell your parents they’re just a bunch of “silly boomers”? You should do something (if not university) by keeping this in mind: be productive!
I have friends, some of the smartest I ever knew who are still in university and their idea of production is meeting a deadline for someone else and receiving two numbers on a page called “grades”—but they produce no goods or services. Their career prospects towards a stable income hardly improve. Whereas I have other friends, who spent time to create a business, invest their money, get to know people, travel a bit, create a podcast & they’re working on their own schedule for money—not high grades.
Wealth ultimately comes from goods and services, not money. Imagine you’re on a deserted island and have 1M in cash on a deserted island is next to worthless, whereas the mango tree (good) is valuable. 1M in Bitcoin on a deserted island is next to worthless, whereas the guy who can captain a boat off the island (service) is valuable.
Increasingly, more and more workplaces do not require degrees to get a job. They want to see motivated, bright people who are willing to work and learn. If you’re looking to start your own workplace, there’s no regulation holding people back from creating their own company. You don’t need any schooling at all to open a Limited Liability Company or Corporation—even the countries (mostly in Asia) that are really strict on getting to know their clients before starting a business ask for a CV but do not specify not education history.
It’s easy for me to say that university may be overrated but it’s difficult for me to say what can be a good replacement– this is up to you. Though it becomes far easier for you to choose if you keep that phrase in mind—Goods and Services. That’s what the world needs–and that’s what you can offer.
The trick is not to get into the highest-ranked university to take on the most amount of debt and max out your credit card; the trick is to find how you can offer what goods and services to the world. Just like someone stranded on that island, do you want to be the guy eating mangos and sailing away or someone who has nothing but an A+ paper.
Your Life is Worth More Than Your Grades
#StayOnTheBall
