Wrong Mental Models College Leaves Us With
College leaves us with a lot of mental baggage that many of us carry throughout life:
If you’ve failed a course, it means you’re a bad student. A failure. Others will look down on you, as they should. A good student may not get an A in every course, but he’ll at least get a B. Only losers fail, so if you fail, you should hang your head in shame. Reality: In life, occasional failures, like a failed startup, are good — they propel you forward in your career, while people who never fail stagnate. A friend of mine who generated $100m in value for his employers said that 90% of the things he’s done in his life failed, and the rest propelled him to where he is now.
The amount of work given to you will be reasonable for the time given, and you have to complete all of it. Saying no is bad. If you fail to take a required course, you won’t graduate. Reality: There will always be more work than time, so prioritising is a critical skill.
Bias for analysis over action. You should come to the computer lab only after you’ve written down every line of code on paper first. You should do an experiment only after you’ve understood all the theory and thought through every aspect of the experiment. Act only after ambiguity is resolved. Reality: We need to progress despite ambiguity. Taking action will resolve ambiguity, while sitting on your ass won’t.
You have only one attempt at doing something, whether an assignment or an exam, so you need to do it slowly and perfectly. Reality: You launch and iterate. Put imperfect work out, identify what’s broken, and later take another stab at it.
Authorities are right, so you need to follow them. Reality: Authorities are not always right, and you should seek to validate the project you’re asked to do before doing it.
When you have a question, you ask an authority like a professor or a TA who’ll answer it for you. Reality: There isn’t always someone to ask, or he may not have time. You should learn by yourself, such as consulting a book, blog or Youtube video, or trying things out. Or asking a peer who doesn’t know, either, and discovering the answer together. You should learn to learn.
Learning is primarily done before graduation. Reality: Learning happens throughout your career, and those who stop learning become useless sooner or later.
Individual work matters. Reality: Most of the time, we work in teams, and what the team achieves matters.
You solve problems after you’re asked to. Reality: If you want to get ahead, you need to proactively solve problems. People won’t invite you to solve them.
Your skills matter. Reality: The outcomes you deliver using these skills matter. Skills are only an input.
Hard skills matter. Reality: Soft skills matter, too. At work, people won’t be as accommodating for your lack of soft skills as your professors were.
Emotions are irrelevant. Reality: The emotions you bring to the job make all the difference to your motivation, energy and tenacity.
Work is intellectual and cool:
Reality: A lot of work we have to do, even in the best jobs, is dirty:
The criteria for evaluation of work done are known and communicated. Reality: The criteria are not clearly known ahead of time, and sometimes not even after the fact.
Learn. You may build some things like a class project, but that’s only in service of learning. Reality: You’re build to build things, and learning is in service of building.
Everyone in the class moves at the same speed. A few bad students may fail, but everyone else moves to the next semester at the same time. Reality: Different people move forward at different speeds.
Learning happens at a designated space (e.g., classroom) and time (you learn networking at 9:30 AM on Wednesday). Reality: Learning happens at random places and times, say in the garden when you’re going for a walk after sunset.
Communication should be long and formal, delivered in 12-page PDFs. Reality: Communication should be clear and short. Nobody will read a 12-page PDF. Don’t take a paragraph to say something that can be said in a sentence. Don’t take a page to say what can be said in a paragraph.
