10 Things I Didn’t Learn in College
By James Altucher
I’ve written before on 10 reasons Parents
Should Not Send Their Kids to College and here is also Eight Alternatives to
College but it’s occurred to me that the place where college has really hurt me
the most was when it came to the real world, real life, how to make money, how
to build a business, and then even how to survive when trying to build my
business, sell it, and be happy afterwards.
Here are the ten things that if I had learned
them in college I probably would’ve saved/made millions of extra dollars, not
wasted years of my life, and maybe would’ve even saved lives because I would’ve
been so smart I would’ve been like an X-Man.
1. How to Program - I spent $100,000 of my own
money (via debt, which I paid back in full) majoring in Computer Science. I
then went to graduate school in computer science. I then remained in an
academic environment for several years doing various computer programming jobs.
Finally I hit the real world. I got a job in corporate America. Everyone
congratulated me where I worked, “you’re going to the real world,” they said. I
was never so happy. I called my friends in NYC, “money is falling from trees
here,” they said. I looked for apartments in Hoboken. I looked at my girlfriend
with a new feeling of gratefulness – we were going to break up once I moved. I
knew it.
In other words, life was going to be great. My
mom even told me, “you’re going to shine at your new job.”
Only one problem: when I arrived at the job,
after 8 years of learning how to program in an academic environment – I
couldn’t program. I won’t get into the details. But I had no clue. I couldn’t
even turn on a computer. It was a mess. I think I even ruined people’s lives
while trying to do my job. I heard my boss whisper to his boss’s boss, “I don’t
know what we’re going to do with him, he has no skills.” And what’s worse is
that I was in a cluster of cubicles so everyone around me could here that whisper
also.
So they sent me to two months of remedial
programming courses at AT&T in New Jersey. If you’ve never been in an
AT&T complex it’s like being a stormtrooper learning how to go to the
bathroom in the Death Star where, inconceivably, in six Star Wars movies there
are no evidence of any bathrooms. Seriously, you couldn’t find a bathroom in
these places. They were mammoth but if you turn down a random corner then,
Voila! – there might be an arts & crafts show. The next corner would have a
display of patents, like “how to eliminate static on a phone line – 1947″. But
I did finally learn how to program.
I know this
because I ran into a guy I used to work with ten years ago who works at
the same place I used to work at. “Man,” he says, “they still use your code.” And I was like,
“really?” “Yeah,” he said, “because it’s
like spaghetti and nobody can figure out how to modify it or even replace it.”
So, everything I dedicated my academic career
to was flushed down the toilet. The last time I programmed a computer was 1999.
It didn’t work. So I gave up. Goodbye C++. I hope I never see you and your
“objects” again.
2. How to Be Betrayed. A girlfriend about 20
years ago wrote in her diary. “I wish James would just die. That would make
this so much easier. Whenever I kiss him I’m thinking of X”. Where X was a good
friend of mine. Of course I put up with it. We went out for several more
months. It’s just a diary, right? She didn’t really mean it! I mean, c’mon. Who
would think about someone else when kissing my beautiful face? I confronted her
of course. She said, “why would you read through my personal items?” Which was
true! Why would I? Don’t have I have any personal items through my own I could
read through? Or a good book, for instance, to take up my time and educate
myself? Kiss, kiss, kiss.
Why can’t they have a good college course
called BETRAYAL 101. I can teach it. Topics we will cover: Betrayal by a
business partner, betrayal by investors, betrayal by a girlfriend (I’d bring in
a special lecturer to talk about betrayal by men, kind of like how Gwynneth
Paltrow does it in Glee), betrayal by children (since they cleverly push the
boundaries right at the limit of betrayal and you have to know when to
recognize that they’ve stepped over the line, betrayal by friends/family (note
to all the friends/family that think I am talking about them, I AM NOT – this
is a serious academic proposal about what needs to be taught in college) – you
help them, then get betrayed – how to deal with that?
Then there are the more subtle issues on
betrayal – self-sabotage. How you can make enough money to live forever and
then repeatedly find yourself in soup kitchens, licking envelopes, attending 12
step meetings, taking medications, and finally reaching some sort of spiritual
recognition that it all doesn’t matter until the next time you sink even lower.
This might be in BETRAYAL 201. Or graduate level studies. I don’t know. Maybe
the Department of Defense needs to give me a grant to work on this since that’s
who funds much of our education.
3. Oh shoot, I was going to put Self-Sabotage
into a third category and not make it a sub-category of How to Be Betrayed.
Hmmm, how do I write myself out of this conundrum. College, after all, does
teach one how to put ideas into a cohesive “report” that is handed in and
graded. Did I form my thesis, argue it correctly, conclude correctly, not
diverge into things like “Kim Kardashian will never be the betrayer, only the
betrayed. But this brings me to: Writing. Why can’t college teach people how to
actually write. Some of my best friends tell me college taught them how to
think. Thinking has a $200,000 price tag
apparently and there is no room left
over for good writing.
And what is good writing? It’s not an opinion.
Or a rant. Or a thesis with logical steps, a deep cavern underneath, beautiful
horizons and mountaintops at the top. Its blood. Its Carrie-style blood. Where
everyone has been fooling you until that exact moment when n0w, with the
psychic power of the written word, you spray pig blood everywhere, at everyone,
and most of all you are covered in blood yourself, the same blood that pushed
you and your placenta out of your mother’s womb, pushed and shot out with you
until just the act of writing itself is a birth, a separation between the old
you and the new you – the you that can no longer take the words back, the words
that now must live and breathe and mature and either make something of
themsleves in life, or remain one of the little blips that reminds us of how
small we really are in an infinite universe. [See also, 33 Unusual Tips to Be a
Better Writer]
4. Dinner Parties. How come i never learned
about dinner parties in college. Sure, there were parties among other people
who looked like me and talked like me and thought like me – other college
students of my age and rough background. But Dinner Parties as an adult are a
whole new beast. There are drinks and snacks beforehand where small talk has to
disguise itself as big talk and then there’s the parts where you KNOW that
everyone is equally worried about what people think about them but that still
doesn’t help at those moments when you talk and you wonder what did people
think of ME? Nobody cares, you tell yourself, intellectually raffling through
pages of self-help blogs in your mind that told you that nobody gives ****
about you.
But still, why don’t we have a class where
there’s Dinner Party after Dinner Party and you learn how to talk at the right
moments, say smart things, be quiet at the right moments, learn to excuse
yourself during the mingling so you can drift from person to person. Learn how
to interrupt a conversation without being rude. Learn how to thank the host so
you can be invited to the next party. And so on. Which brings me to:
5. Networking. Did it really take 20 years
after I graduated college before someone wrote a book, “Never Eat Alone.” Why
didn’t Jesus write that book. Or Plato. Then we might’ve read it in religious
school or it would’ve been one of those “big Thinkers” we need to read in
college so we can learn how to think. I still don’t know how to network
properly so this paragraph is small. I’m classified under the DSM VI as a “social
shut-in”. I’d like to get out and be social but when the moment comes, I can only make it out the door about 1 in ten
times. I always say, “I’d love to get together” but then I don’t know how to do it. Perhaps
because not one dollar of my $100,000 spent on not learning how to program a
computer was also not spent on learning how to network with people. [See also,
my recent TechCrunch article, "9 Ways to be a Super-Connector"]
My roommate for instance would tell me, “Reagan
is definitely getting impeached THIS TIME.” And I visited his dad’s mansion
over Christmas break and he told me all about Trotskyism and the proletariat
and I had to work jobs 40 hours a week while taking six courses so I could A)
graduate early and B) pay my personal
expenses and when i would run into him he had long hair and would nod
about how a lot of the college workers (but not the lowest-paid, poorest
treated ones – the students who worked) were thinking of unionizing and he was
helping with that. “Do you have a job?” I asked and he said, “no time”. And
that’s politics in college.
What about the real politics of how people try
to backstab you at the corporate workplace or VCs never properly explained the
“ratchet” concept to you before they kicked you out of the company and then
re-financed. Nobody told me a thing about that in three years of college and
two years of graduate school. I wish I would’ve known that for my $100,000.
7. Failure. Goes without saying they don’t
teach you this. If you are going to pay $100,000, why would you fail? You might
think you were wasting your money if the first mandatory elective you had to
take was about failure. About wondering how you were going to feed your family
after you got fired when something that was not your fault: Post-Traumatic-Lehman-Stress
Syndrome, a common medical condition coming up in the DSM VII.
8. Sales. When I was busy learning how to “not
program” nobody ever taught me how to sell what it was I was programming. Or
sell myself. Or sell out. Or sell my ideas and turn them into money. Or sell a
product to someone who might need it. Or even better, sell it to someone who
doesn’t need it. Some business programs might have courses on salesmanship but
those are BS because everyone automatically gets As in MBA programs so that the
schools can demonstrate what good jobs their students get so they then get more
applicants and the scam/cycle continues. But sales: how to demonstrate passion
behind an idea you had, you built, you signed up for, so that people are
willing to pay hard-earned after-tax money for it, is the number one key to any
success and I have never seen it taught (properly) in college.
9. Negotiation. You’ve gotten the idea, you
executed, you made the sale and now…what’s the price. What part of your body
will be amputated in exchange for infinite wisdom. Will you give up one eye? Or
your virility? Because something has to go if you are up against a good
negotiator? What? You already thought (like most people without any experience
do) that you were ALREADY a good negotiator. A good negotiator will skin your
back, tattoo it with “SUCKA” and hang it up above the fireplace in his pool
house if you don’t know what you are doing.
The funny thing is, the best sales people (who are just aiming for
people to say “YES!”) are often the worst negotiators (“it’s very hard to say
“No” when you are trying to get people to “Yes”). These are things I wish I had
learned in school. I’ve been beaten in negotiations on at least 5 different
occasions, which fortunately became five valuable lessons I’ve learned the hard
way, instead of studying examples and being forced to think about it for the
$100k in debt I got going to college.
People will say, “well, that’s your experience
in college. Mine was very different.” And it’s true. You joined the sororities
and learned how to network and dinner party and be political and everything
there is to know about betrayal. My college experience was sadly unique and
probably different from everyone else’s so you would be completely right to quote
me that inane statistic about how college graduates earn 4% more than high
school graduates and are consequently 4% happier (another thing, 10. Happiness.
We never learn how it’s a combination of the food we eat, our health, our
ability to be creative, our ability to have sound emotional relationships, our
ability to find something bigger than ourselves and our egos to give up our
spiritual virginity to.)
So I can tell you what I wish I did. I wish I
had gone to Soviet Russia, and played chess, and then gone to India and learned
yoga and health, and I wish I had gone to South America and volunteered for
kids with no arms, and did any number of things. But people then say, “haha!
but that cost money.” And they would be right. It would cost less than $100,000+
but would still cost some money. I have no idea how much.
But one of these days when the scars of college
go away and I truly learn how to think. I might have better comebacks for these
people. Or if I truly learn, I would learn not to care at all.
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