Serenastyle Blog

I often find myself having to explain to people why I’m graduating yet not even old enough to go to the bar with them. People repeatedly remind me that our economy is in a pothole and that it’s best to stay in school—naw, you don’t say? I even suggested it to others in this post and I understand why I should play it safe, but I’m challenging myself. I don’t want to stay in school, and here are my practical reasons for being impractical.

1. Universities “make minds, not careers”. I don’t go to a vocational school, I go to a research institute/university. We have breadth requirements for a reason. Professors only teach us how to think, and even technical majors (like mine) are heavily theoretical. So I read Ovid’s mythological tales. I studied the history of racial city planning. I learned about the Ugyhur people in Central Asia. I drew economic graphs for hypothetical situations. I read a binder full of marketing case studies. I memorized hundreds of index cards on architectural landmarks all over the world. I wrote many papers on topics ranging from 1600 BC Mycenae to present day Silicon Valley. I read some more. Yes, my worldview is slightly broader and I have more sources to draw inspiration from, but I’ve been more inspired by trips through inner China and tours around Europe. I have acquired stacks of textbooks and readers teaching me how to calculate earthquake and wind forces and how to build shallow concrete foundations—but? I really didn’t learn anything about construction until I went to New Orleans with Habitat for Humanity. I don’t want to be welled up in school anymore—I want real world, eye-opening experience. The irony to “making minds” is, college makes everyone conform. People in each department are so similar to each other. The architecture students only live in Wurster and learn from the same studiomates. The Haas kids generally only socialize with each other. The computer science geeks lock themselves up in lab all day and night.

2. Berkeley is suffocating me. Being Asian American makes me a majority, pursuing the arts makes me a minority, and slaving away at school impels me to be only mediocre at best. In a classroom setting, I am just another average student striving towards academic excellence. Everything I have achieved was outside a classroom without the help of any professors—and that’s how I will continue to differentiate myself. As I was searching for classes to take, I came across a course on virtual communities and social media. At first I was excited, then disappointed by the long waitlist—then slapping myself in the forehead. Wait, I want to learn about social media from an old professor in a classroom?! I must be kidding myself. What, is there a textbook as well? If he’s reading the latest updates on TechCrunch, VentureBeat, GigaOM, and Alley Insider, and so am I, what’s the difference? If I’m testing out beta versions of the latest online technologies, why do I need to be sitting in a classroom listening to a professor lecture me on what I can learn for myself? I must give him props though—he has over 6,000 followers on Twitter. Last night I was partying in SF’s Financial District in a room full of young entrepreneurs and Stanford Ph.D candidates with international backgrounds. Would I have been better off hitting up a business fraternity near campus? I doubt it.

3. I have faith in myself. I’ve stepped outside of my comfort zone innumerable times to build up my network. I’ve broadened my skill set to make myself more valuable and marketable. I know what I want for myself, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to achieve my goals. To wrap up my first two points, school is like a giant organization with professors who speak knowledge and advice to us. We listen, read, take a few exams to prove that we’ve listened and read. Then we move on to the next subject. The professor mentioned previously has 6,000+ followers (now including me) because we all want to gain advice from him. The problem with staying in school only is, we’re not out there applying anything we’ve actually learned.

A tip is like…what? A little scrap of a map. Not only is it not the actual destination, but the part you can hold in your hand will only make sense when you understand its place in a much bigger picture. So, sure, you might get a kick out of gazing at the pretty colors and reading the funny names to your cat, and, heck, once you’ve collected enough little maps, you may even start fancying yourself a gifted cartographer. But, never for a minute start fantasizing that being a map collector means you’ve visited all the locations on those pieces of paper. If you ever decided to attempt them, your actual travels would very much benefit from a competent (and whole) map of where you’re heading, but it necessarily requires movement, change, and enduring potentially long stretches in which you’ll have to find your own bearings in three tip-free dimensions. At their best, “tips” are a fine way to incrementally improve a process that you’re already dedicated to practicing on a regular basis. And, in that context, tips work. For example, a tip on your golf swing may be very useful if you’re already playing three times a week and hitting a bucket of balls after work every day. But a subscription to a magazine about taekwondo will only be as useful as your decision to drag your fat ass into a dojo and start actually kicking people. Over and over. Otherwise, you’re just buying shiny paper every month.

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In my opinion, the problems with tip culture on the web are many, not least the evidence that most of the page-view-obsessed poopers of online tips seem to have zero real interest in solving any problem beyond their own need to generate repeat traffic from dazed information tourists. But, the common problem of all tip fixations traces back to a misunderstanding of how anybody ever got great at doing anything. We can’t get good at something solely by reading about it. And we’ll never make giant leaps in any endeavor by treating it like a snack food that we munch on whenever we’re getting bored. You get good at something by doing it repeatedly. And by listening to specific criticism from people who are already good at what you do. And by a dedication to getting better, even when it’s inconvenient and may not involve a handy bulleted list. If this strikes you as fancy talk, may I suggest that you approach the woman in your life who most enjoys sexual intercourse, and, in the nicest way possible, ask her whether she’d prefer to have congress with:

1. a confident partner who has had a long career of safe and mutually-satisfying romps with a range of people who liked different things; or,
2. a 50-year-old virgin who likes reading blogs about sex tips.

You know the answer, and so does she. There’s probably more than one reason that poor #2 is still just a well-read dilettante, but a strong candidate for the top spot would be how he’s allowed his ardor for acquiring “tips” to take the place of getting started in the actual, complicated, and sometimes very confusing craft of making ladyparts happy. -Merlin Mann, 43 Folders

I desperately want to work, learn while working, and get paid for gaining.