Adam Robinson is a genius writer, entrepreneur, chess champion and more. He recently appeared on Tim Ferris’s Tribe of Mentors podcast and this passage for College Students entering the real world was just fascinating. I highly recommend you listen to the complete cast.
This is important. You don’t have to be as young as a college grad to take this advice. In fact, I dictated this passage to not only share with you but to share with my daughters who are only just entering their school careers. This is great advice period.
Tim Ferriss: What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the real world?
Adam Robinson: Yikes! I can a write a book in response to this question. So instead I’ll just toss out a hodge podge of observations, truths, maxims, caveats, and exhortations, that I wish I’d known or at least fully appreciated when I just enter the real world myself.
Congratulations. You recently left or soon be leaving an ecosystem that you’ve known for your whole life for an entirely new one. To switch analogies you’re leaving a game you’ve played since first grade with a rule book you’ve consciously or unconsciously assimilated and more or less mastered for an entirely new game with no formal rule book handed out. You’ll have to write your own rule book.
You’d think the point of education would be to prepare you for the real world but the real world is more unlike school then like it. Indeed you’ll find many of the traits, habits, and behaviors that served you well in school will either not work in the real world or will work against you. So you’ll have to adopt an experimental attitude towards everything continually testing what works for you and what doesn’t.
You’d think the point of education would be to prepare you for the real world but the real world is more unlike school than like it.
Graduating from college or leaving behind your formal schooling, whatever form it took, to enter the real world, is be a major first step since it marks the first time in your life where you’ll be making most of the decisions that affect that life. Rather than being told what to do or being assigned what to do. You won’t receive a clear corse syllabus every few months outlining the assignments and what is expected of you. And the standards a single person, your professor, will evaluate your work and reward you a single letter grade. So you’ll have to find your own incentives.
Another enormous difference is that for the first time you won’t be needing to navigate simply a culvert of peers more or less exactly your age and from very similar backgrounds if not aspirations. No longer. Now you’ll be interacting with a broad spectrum of humanity in all of it’s delightful but sometimes challenging diversity. So you’ll need to acquire a whole new set of people skills and ways to relate to others and cultivate what’s known as emotional intelligence.
So the rhythms of your life from the daily, to the weekly, to the monthly, to the yearly will be the ones you establish on your own rather than the structures and time tables dictated by the academic calendar year. You’ll find this lack of structure more or less disorienting. And the more you develop routines, daily or weekly at least, the better.
Another recommendation. Instead of asking yourself what do you want to do? Ask rather Who do you want to be? Whatever you’re doing for work, whatever, throw yourself into it whole heartedly even if you realize it’s a transitional gig while you search for something better. Don’t ever worry that you’ll be doing this for the rest of your life. You won’t. But if that’s your attitude you’ll be missing out on the next point.
If there were a single quality under-appreciated by recent graduates that will most ensure your career success. It’s not the obvious ones like intelligence, and good habits, and discipline and the capacity for hard work, but rather this—enthusiasm. In all matters be enthusiastic and others will want to be around you and work with you and you’ll flourish.
Unrelenting enthusiasm: I can’t recommend that strongly enough. Unrelenting.
As long as you’re following all the other rules here have patience. Life moves at once much slower than you expect and much faster. You could be doing everything right, paying your dues, and for months and years it seems like you’re not making any progress and then all of a sudden BOOM your life explodes forward at light speed. Benjamin Disraeli said that The secret of success was to be ready for your opportunity when it presents itself. Until then, pay your dues.
Your success in the world rests largely on your ability to create compelling positive visions of the future that others will feel irresistibly drawn to be a part of. That goes for not only your professional life but your personal and romantic life.
As early as you can try and connect to your personal mission. Who are you here on this planet to be? Mark Twain said The two most important days of your life are the day you were born and the day you discover why.
I promise you: the sooner you become aware of a mission larger than yourself that you are devoted to, the exponentially more rapidly your personal and professional goals will be achieved. Find out what you love or can do best and cultivate that talent or talents. Then be relentless in finding jobs or situations in which those strengths and passions are most in demand. Know what your hammer in a sense and then look for nails to hit.
The most important gifts and goals in life including love, success, and happiness are never achieved by pursuing them directly. Those people focused on finding love for an example have their attention and priorities diverted from being the kind of loving, lovable person that would naturally attract the love their looking for. And if your focus is on becoming successful, wealthy, or whatever, your attention isn’t focused on the activities and tasks and others that will actually lead to that success and wealth. Love, success, and happiness catch you best by surprise while your attention is focused on doing in the world and being your best self in that world.
