Monday Musings (6/24/19)

Hey everybody, 

Greetings from Lake Tahoe! I’m here with family to celebrate my sister’s birthday. We’re golfing, hiking and kayaking and the views are beautiful. 

Two reminders: 

1. I’ll be hosting a writing workshop in New York City on Monday, July 1st. If you’re interested, you can purchase tickets here.

2. I’ll be teaching two online courses this summer: Building a Second Brain and Write of Passage. These are serious courses for serious people who want to seriously level up. You’ll learn how to start sharing your ideas online. By the end of the summer, you’ll have such mastery over the information in your life (emails, podcasts, books, meetings, etc.) that other people will think you have a superpower.

You can sign up for these courses here.

— —

Thoughts on College

College is a mess. For the vast majority of students, it’s a waste of time and money. It’s expensive, hyper-competitive, and quite frankly... not worth all the effort. It’s time to expand the pool of educational offerings.

I have three ideas: help students find work, start college later, or skip college and do four years of service. 

— —

1. Help Students Find Work

We need to be clear: Is college a place for students to learn how to be a human? Or is college a place to acquire employment-worthy skills?

Both have their merits. But I suspect we should help students find a job first. College students don’t have enough real-world experience to wrestle with the big questions. As a cohort, they’re not ready to read Thoreau or Twain, Derrida or Dostoyevsky.

First and foremost, colleges should help students acquire in-demand skills. No student should spend four years in a window-less classroom and $200,000 on an education, and still struggle to find a job. And yet, since our colleges focus so much on skills that don’t lead to jobs, too many graduates can’t find work after school. 

I believe that the #1 goal of an college education is to help students find a meaningful career path. Once they find work, they can explore the big questions. I call this Maslow’s Hierarchy of Education. 

— — 

2. Start College Later

I speak with a college student almost every week. And when I do, I ask about their university experience. Most of them are bored. Their classes don’t satisfy their intellectual curiosity. Some feel that their college environment isn’t challenging enough. Others want to build