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January 2005  
  
 _(I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the
school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.)_  
  
When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious. What
will you say to high school students? So I asked them, what do you wish
someone had told you in high school? Their answers were remarkably similar. So
I'm going to tell you what we all wish someone had told us.  
  
I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high school:
what you want to do with your life. People are always asking you this, so you
think you're supposed to have an answer. But adults ask this mainly as a
conversation starter. They want to know what sort of person you are, and this
question is just to get you talking. They ask it the way you might poke a
hermit crab in a tide pool, to see what it does.  
  
If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that
my first priority was to learn what the options were. You don't need to be in
a rush to choose your life's work. What you need to do is discover what you
like. You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you
do.  
  
It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but it
turns out to be hard, partly because it's hard to get an accurate picture of
most jobs. Being a doctor is not the way it's portrayed on TV. Fortunately you
can also watch real doctors, by volunteering in hospitals.   
  
But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them
yet. Most of the work I've done in the last ten years didn't exist when I was
in high school. The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is
itself speeding up. In such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.  
  
And yet every May, speakers all over the country fire up the Standard
Graduation Speech, the theme of which is: don't give up on your dreams. I know
what they mean, but this is a bad way to put it, because it implies you're
supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on. The computer world has a
name for this: premature optimization. And it is synonymous with disaster.
These speakers would do better to say simply, don't give up.  
  
What they really mean is, don't get demoralized. Don't think that you can't do
what other people can. And I agree you shouldn't underestimate your potential.
People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And
most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful
attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the
story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the
subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate
genius. In fact 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. If these guys were able to do
what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then
it's not our fault if we can't do something as good.  
  
I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose
between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one
is probably right.  
  
So far we've cut the Standard Graduation Speech down from "don't give up on
your dreams" to "what someone else can do, you can do." But it needs to be cut
still further. There is _some_ variation in natural ability. Most people
overestimate its role, but it does exist. If I were talking to a guy four feet
tall whose ambition was to play in the NBA, I'd feel pretty stupid saying, you
can do anything if you really try.   
  
We need to cut the Standard Graduation Speech down to, "what someone else with
your abilities can do, you can do; and don't underestimate your abilities."
But as so often happens, the closer you get to the truth, the messier your
sentence gets. We've taken a nice, neat (but wrong) slogan, and churned it up
like a mud puddle. It doesn't make a very good speech anymore. But worse
still, it doesn't tell you what to do anymore. Someone with your abilities?
What are your abilities?  
  
**Upwind**  
  
I think the solution is to work in the other direction. Instead of working
back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most
successful people actually do anyway.  
  
In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty
years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that
you don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options
available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of
options afterward.  
  
It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your
time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry
later about which you'll take.  
  
Suppose you're a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or
economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any
field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school
in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad
school in math.  
  
Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn't have an
engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you
let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow
uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a
replacement for "don't give up on your dreams." Stay upwind.  
  
How do you do that, though? Even if math is upwind of economics, how are you
supposed to know that as a high school student?  
  
Well, you don't, and that's what you need to find out.  Look for smart people
and hard problems. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you can find
such a clump, it's probably worthwhile to join it. But it's not
straightforward to find these, because there is a lot of faking going on.  
  
To a newly arrived undergraduate, all university departments look much the
same. The professors all seem forbiddingly intellectual and publish papers
unintelligible to outsiders. But while in some fields the papers are
unintelligible because they're full of hard ideas, in others they're
deliberately written in an obscure way to seem as if they're saying something
important. This may seem a scandalous proposition, but it has been
experimentally verified, in the famous _Social Text_ affair. Suspecting that
the papers published by literary theorists were often just intellectual-
sounding nonsense, a physicist deliberately wrote a paper full of
intellectual-sounding nonsense, and submitted it to a literary theory journal,
which published it.  
  
The best protection is always to be working on hard problems. Writing novels
is hard. Reading novels isn't. Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that
something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be able to
understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to
be suspense.  
  
Well, this seems a grim view of the world, you may think. What I'm telling you
is that you should worry? Yes, but it's not as bad as it sounds. It's
exhilarating to overcome worries. You don't see faces much happier than people
winning gold medals. And you know why they're so happy? Relief.  
  
I'm not saying this is the only way to be happy. Just that some kinds of worry
are not as bad as they sound.  
  
**Ambition**  
  
In practice, "stay upwind" reduces to "work on hard problems." And you can
start today. I wish I'd grasped that in high school.  
  
Most people like to be good at what they do. In the so-called real world this
need is a powerful force. But high school students rarely benefit from it,
because they're given a fake thing to do. When I was in high school, I let
myself believe that my job was to be a high school student. And so I let my
need to be good at what I did be satisfied by merely doing well in school.  
  
If you'd asked me in high school what the difference was between high school
kids and adults, I'd have said it was that adults had to earn a living. Wrong.
It's that adults take responsibility for themselves. Making a living is only a
small part of it. Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility
for oneself.  
  
If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job. I don't
mean that I'd slack in school. Working at something as a day job doesn't mean
doing it badly. It means not being defined by it. I mean I wouldn't think of
myself as a high school student, just as a musician with a day job as a waiter
doesn't think of himself as a waiter.  And when I wasn't working at my day
job I'd start trying to do real work.  
  
When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they nearly all say
the same thing: that they wasted so much time. If you're wondering what you're
doing now that you'll regret most later, that's probably it.   
  
Some people say this is inevitable — that high school students aren't capable
of getting anything done yet. But I don't think this is true. And the proof is
that you're bored. You probably weren't bored when you were eight. When you're
eight it's called "playing" instead of "hanging out," but it's the same thing.
And when I was eight, I was rarely bored. Give me a back yard and a few other
kids and I could play all day.  
  
The reason this got stale in middle school and high school, I now realize, is
that I was ready for something else. Childhood was getting old.  
  
I'm not saying you shouldn't hang out with your friends — that you should all
become humorless little robots who do nothing but work. Hanging out with
friends is like chocolate cake. You enjoy it more if you eat it occasionally
than if you eat nothing but chocolate cake for every meal. No matter how much
you like chocolate cake, you'll be pretty queasy after the third meal of it.
And that's what the malaise one feels in high school is: mental queasiness.
  
  
You may be thinking, we have to do more than get good grades. We have to have
_extracurricular activities._ But you know perfectly well how bogus most of
these are. Collecting donations for a charity is an admirable thing to do, but
it's not _hard._ It's not getting something done. What I mean by getting
something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or
what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to draw the human
face from life. This sort of thing rarely translates into a line item on a
college application.  
  
**Corruption**  
  
It's dangerous to design your life around getting into college, because the
people you have to impress to get into college are not a very discerning
audience. At most colleges, it's not the professors who decide whether you get
in, but admissions officers, and they are nowhere near as smart. They're the
NCOs of the intellectual world. They can't tell how smart you are. The mere
existence of prep schools is proof of that.  
  
Few parents would pay so much for their kids to go to a school that didn't
improve their admissions prospects. Prep schools openly say this is one of
their aims. But what that means, if you stop to think about it, is that they
can hack the admissions process: that they can take the very same kid and make
him seem a more appealing candidate than he would if he went to the local
public school.   
  
Right now most of you feel your job in life is to be a promising college
applicant. But that means you're designing your life to satisfy a process so
mindless that there's a whole industry devoted to subverting it. No wonder you
become cynical. The malaise you feel is the same that a producer of reality TV
shows or a tobacco industry executive feels. And you don't even get paid a
lot.  
  
So what do you do? What you should not do is rebel. That's what I did, and it
was a mistake. I didn't realize exactly what was happening to us, but I
smelled a major rat. And so I just gave up. Obviously the world sucked, so why
bother?  
  
When I discovered that one of our teachers was herself using Cliff's