Introduction
The final page of this month’s Southwest
Magazine is a column called “One Question.” The question—“What’s the best
advice you’ve received?”—was directed toward Hilary Duff. Her reply ran 73 words, of which 62 had just
one syllable. Including this sentence
I’m already at 52 words, with only 29 one-syllable words. This is why Hilary Duff gets to be published
in a magazine and I don’t. Perhaps it
helps that she’s an attractive actress whose photo deserves to take up 3/4 of
the page.
Since I can’t be an attractive actress or published writer, I’ve
decided to comfort myself by answering the One Question myself, but
better. “Better” in this context means
“more words, bigger words, and no photo.”
If that’s not enough to keep you reading, here’s another hook: I didn’t even follow the advice I’m about to cite.
The advice
The best advice I ever received was, “You don’t need to go
to college.” I did go to college, and I
would advise each and every high school kid to attend college if he possibly
can. So why do I appreciate this advice?
Let’s back up and look at the mindset I had when I received
this guidance. It was the 1980s and I
was a teenager in Boulder, Colorado (where everybody was middle-class or higher,
well-educated, and white). The
conventional wisdom was that if you went to college you would get a
white-collar job and be happy and successful.
Oh, and we were generally encouraged to attend the best college we could.
Contrast this to the mindset of what appears to be the
typical teenager today in my kids’ demographic (Albany, California; middle
class or higher; well-educated; white or Asian). The conventional wisdom here is, “If you ever
get a single B in high school you will never get into a decent college and you
will have NO FUTURE, and by the way, grades aren’t enough so you should be
taking at least four or five AP classes and also doing all kinds of
extracurricular activities that will look good on your application, but no
matter what you do you’re probably doomed and will never go to a top college
and you’ll never achieve the standard of living your parents now provide for
you, you miserable wretch.”
Okay, that’s not entirely fair. I don’t think our current crop of teens uses the
word “wretch.”
The matter of
perspective
As a teenager, I appreciated the odd “skip college” advice
because it opened the door, just a crack, for an alternative point of
view. Of course it helped that this
point of view came from a successful person.
Obviously if a homeless dude gave me that advice, it wouldn’t mean a
thing. But by “successful” I don’t just
mean “has a nice house in Boulder and some cool toys like an actual Model-T
Ford that actually runs, an actual NASA space suit, a cool working jukebox, a
working parking meter, and an immaculate 1950s Pontiac 8 car with fins and
chrome and an in-line 8-cylinder engine so the hood goes on for days.” By “successful” I also mean “has a really
wild career that he obviously loves.”
The person dispensing this advice was Michael Aisner, who at
that time was the director of the Coors International Bicycle Classic, which
was the biggest, most important cycling stage race ever held in this country
(and which to date has never been surpassed).
I’m going to throw in a caveat here: I won’t put words in Mike’s mouth and claim
that he’d still give this advice today (though I suspect he would), and I’ll
add that he wouldn’t necessarily have given this advice to just anybody (though
I suspect I wasn’t a special case).
I got to know Mike because I worked as a volunteer for his
race—not just when it was going on, but year-round at their headquarters in
Boulder, Colorado—“the race office,” as we all called it. I wouldn’t say I worked as an intern, though
I suppose that’s what I was, because at that time I’d never heard the word
“intern,” and had no idea that volunteering your time at a company would “look
good on your college application.” If
you’d asked me at the time what this job would do for my college prospects, I’d
probably have just shrugged, or said, “I
guess it slightly damages my college prospects since I’m so distracted from my
schoolwork.” I volunteered at the race
office because it was a cool place to hang, and there were great people there,
and I would get to use a computer, and figured I’d learn a lot.
My perspective going into that job was thus fairly
compatible with Mike’s. He just took it
up a notch by suggesting that if you like to work, and you are surrounded by
great people, and you learn a lot, and you just keep that up, you’ll eventually
start getting paid, and will go on to have a fulfilling career, and it would be
pointless to halt this progress in its tracks to go sit in lecture halls for
four years and incur a bunch of debt.
A couple of paradoxes
Here are a couple of paradoxes introduced by what I’ve
written so far.
First, Mike himself did go to college. (Did he graduate? I’m not sure … when I asked him he laughed
and said, “Do you know you’re the first person who’s ever asked me that?”) The point is, he’s had this great and diverse
career history based on his ability to execute, not his formal education. Working in his office, which had no walls and
no cubicles, I got to hear him in action, mostly on the phone, and probably
learned more about business than if I’d studied it in college. (I’m tempted to apologize here to any
business majors who might be reading this, but who am I kidding?)
The second paradox is that I didn’t follow Mike’s advice—I did go to college. I ignored his advice for two reasons. One, I didn’t have the balls to believe what he
was telling me. I felt in my very bones
that without a college degree, I’d never amount to anything, no matter how
inspiring his example was. (I’m still glad I have that degree, even though my
most important mentor, in my current career, dropped out of college because he
couldn’t bear to leave a great internship at the end of the summer.)
The second reason I went to college is that even then, I
loved literature and I loved writing.
Studying English for four years under brilliant professors was something
I wanted to do for its own sake. I
recognized even at the time that this was a departure from the typical results-oriented
mindset that would have me studying engineering or business. I was prepared to accept that my major
wouldn’t automatically lead to good career prospects.
Why Mike’s advice was
so good
What made Mike’s advice so good is that it conveyed a simple
but evasive message: there are many
paths to success. This is true even with
conventional notions of success (e.g., big money, big house, cool toys, respect
and prestige). I’ll concede that college
is probably more important to one’s prospects than it was a generation ago, but
Mike’s basic idea still holds true: the
path everybody assumes is mandatory—that is, Perfect grades à AP classes à
extracurriculars à great college à
great career à happy life—isn’t the only
path, never was, and never will be.
While I didn’t follow Mike’s specific advice, his overall message may
have emboldened me to choose the major I wanted, and worry about my prospects
later.
I try to pass along this wider perspective to my daughter Alexa,
who’s in high school now, but she won’t listen.
After all, my cred as an alternate-path happy person is ruined because I
graduated summa cum laude from a
great college. Nor does it seem to
matter that I took an alternate path to get there: my high school grades weren’t good enough for
Berkeley, so I went to UC Santa Barbara for a couple years and transferred in
later. She counters that it’s harder to
get into good colleges now, and you practically have to have perfect grades
even to get into UCSB. (I have no idea
if this is true.)
The problem, I think, is her peer group. These are high-achieving nerds (a lot like I
was at that age, except higher-achieving and more socially comfortable, because
nerds are cool now). But evidently somebody
is feeding them doom-and-gloom scenarios involving the necessity of perfect
grades, the importance of AP courses and extracurriculars, and the implication
that any deviation leads to being a hopeless miserable wretch.
Why should this be? In
general, the parents in my community don’t preach this perfection-or-else
paradigm. A number of my fellow parents went
to non-elite colleges and more than a few like to laugh about what screw-ups
they were in high school. That said, the
parents of some of Alexa’s friends came here from other countries, had to work really
hard and make serious sacrifices to get here, and never had the luxury of
growing up in Boulder and just assuming everything would work out fine. I can’t fault their perspective, but I also
can’t compete with it, because it’s easier to apply pressure than to remove it.
The best advice I can
give
One of the great things about Hilary Duff’s column is that,
in just 73 words, she not only passed along her mother’s advice (“do as much as
you can in one day”), but turned it on its head with contrapuntal advice of her
own (“I’ve learned the importance of stillness”). So I’ll try my hand at dispensing advice, too.
The best advice I can give is “Take on a hobby that is fun
but competitive.” The point of this
hobby isn’t to “look good on a college application,” but to learn how to stare
failure in the face instead of trying to avoid it all the time. As a recovering bike racer, I’ve had to
accept failure hundreds of times, which has really sweetened the deal on those
rare occasions I’ve managed to succeed.
The pressure here comes from within, not from some rule of thumb like
toeing the line and keeping your school transcript in order.
This isn’t to say I don’t accidentally put pressure on my
kid. For example, I inadvertently added
to her stress in the moments before her very first mountain bike race, by the
very act of trying to help her relax. It
was a cold and rainy morning, and the race course—highly technical to begin
with—had turned to mud. Figuring this alone
was a lot for any kid to take on by itself, not to mention the head-to-head
competition, I casually said, “The important thing is just to hang in there and
try to finish.”
Who know this simple statement was like lobbing a grenade
into Alexa’s pre-race psyche? Here is her
own eloquent description of this exchange, taken from her race report:
My dad looked about as nervous as I felt, and mentioned offhandedly that his goal was for me not to drop out. This was worrisome for a number of reasons: a) my dad clearly wasn’t super confident about my abilities, and b) it honestly hadn’t occurred to me that I could drop out. The fact that I was [now] aware it was a possibility made it seem likely, and I was suddenly convinced that I would be possessed by forces beyond my control, forces that are less stubbornly competitive and ambitious than I am, and these would cause me to quit.
Of course she did finish, and placed higher than I think
either of us expected, and she even took it upon herself to write a
self-deprecatingly funny essay about it all.
I’m cheered to see that her embrace of the
“perfect-transcript-or-NO-FUTURE!” ethos hasn’t turned her into a complete CV-building,
book-pounding drone.
Again with the
alternate perspective
I suspect that, whatever success my daughter ultimately has in
cycling, it won’t end up on her college application, and I applaud that—it
means she’s doing this for its own sake, as I had. Meanwhile, this pursuit will give my daughter
something more important than bragging rights:
the all-important opportunity to fail at something without the world
ending. She will drop out of races, and
will lose races, and she will get the kind of results that don’t earn an A—but
none of this will besmirch any written transcript. Moreover, as Alexa races her bike over the
next four years she will realize that the traditional path toward sporting
excellence—which is something like The right
parents à big talent à
big drive à small victories à
big victories à big glory—isn’t the only
one, and that alternatives exist, such as Wrong
parents à embarrassing mediocrity à
fighting spirit à venom à
big drive à technical mastery à
cunning à small victories à
moral victories à ability to eat a pile
of tri-tip the size of a human head and still hear people say, “I wish I had
your metabolism.”
And maybe, just maybe, that accumulation of experience will give
her some peace and help establish the radical idea that there are many paths to
take, and an alternative path can still lead you to the success you sought, or perhaps
to an alternative success you hadn’t even thought of. This process may ultimately have the same effect
as Mike Aisner’s radical, incendiary words—“You don’t have to go to college”—and
their subtext, “Dive in, do something you love, do it for its own sake, do it
well, and you’ll be fine.”
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