Feb. 27, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
04:54
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Oh, big question this morning on Twitter. | |
| How do you succeed? Because I was saying, man, don't go to college unless you absolutely have to. | |
| You need some professional designation like lawyer, doctor, engineer or something. | |
| Don't go to college. And people say, oh yeah, well then how do you succeed? | |
| And in particular, how do you teach your child to succeed? | |
| Well, I'll tell you. And I've got some reason to impart this knowledge. | |
| None of the things I've succeeded in as an adult have I been formally trained in in the past. | |
| I co-founded and I was chief technical officer of a software company that is still in existence after a quarter century. | |
| That is some really good business magic right there. | |
| I run this world's biggest philosophy show, Free Domain. | |
| I did take a graduate degree in history and my graduate thesis was on the history of philosophy, but I'm not teaching the history of philosophy. | |
| I'm teaching actual original philosophy and that comes out of my hobbies as a teenager. | |
| I do have some reason and some expertise in this area. | |
| So let me tell you what you need to do to succeed in the absence of a college. | |
| So as a kid, as a teen, you've got to do uncomfortable things. | |
| You've got to do things that go against the grain. | |
| Me, I was shy as a child and I pushed through it. | |
| Now I go give a speech and I'll sit there with 500 people afterwards and one by one They'll come up, we'll hug and talk about philosophy and move on to the next person. | |
| You've got to get over things that are difficult for you. | |
| And if you do, man, you'll be head and shoulders above everyone else who just takes the easy route, who avoids what is hard and pursues what is easy and generally wastes their life that way. | |
| Here's another thing you've got to do. | |
| Whether you're a child, a teenager, or whatever age you are now, you've got to sit down and read big, thick, meaty, deep, and important books. | |
| You have to now. Again, I had a peculiar advantage slash disadvantage this way because I hated my home life as a child. | |
| I really hated it as a teenager, and the only close place that was warm and comfortable was the local library, so I just kind of half-lived at the library, and I just grabbed books off the shelf and just read, read, read. | |
| When you read important books, when you read great writers, it imprints great language in your brain. | |
| It imprints great sentence structure, great analogies, great metaphors, great clarity of thought, great imagery. | |
| And that's one of the reasons I can do this stuff on the fly now is because I just read voraciously. | |
| And that's important to do. | |
| And, of course, I know it's tempting. | |
| You've got Twitter. | |
| You've got Facebook. You've got the Internet as a whole. | |
| You've got whatever, emails. | |
| Turn all that stuff off and read a book that's as thick as your vertical thumb, if you can, and that will give you a huge amount of advantage when it comes to sentence construction, to clarity of thought, to clarity of conversation, and write, write, write. | |
| I wrote my first short story when I was six. | |
| I wrote my first novel, By the Light of an Alien Sun, when I was 11. | |
| My English teacher actually read it out to the class, and it was kind of cool. | |
| And just write. | |
| It doesn't have to be great. It can be just your thoughts. | |
| You can throw it in the fireplace, but just write and learn how to organize your thoughts in language because so much of success is communication, reading and writing. | |
| Leadership is definitely all of that, so learn how to do that. | |
| Here's another thing. Learn a skill that's hard. | |
| It's really important that you be neither vain nor insecure. | |
| Now, the way that you end up vain is you only do things that are easy and that gives you the weird mistaken impression that everything is easy and anyone else who struggles with something is somehow inferior. | |
| Now, you've got to struggle with something that's hard to learn. | |
| Maybe it's chess, maybe it's learning a foreign language, maybe it's learning an instrument. | |
| I did violin for 10 years, did not come easy to me. | |
| I was in an orchestra and it was a challenge, right? | |
| So then you gain the humility of knowing that there are things that are really tough in the world, and you also gain the pride of having learned how to become good at something that doesn't come easy to you. | |
| That's really, really important. | |
| So through that process, you will end up hopefully being open to being mentored, be open to being taught. | |
| If there's an expert out there who enjoys teaching you because you're enthusiastic, you're a good student, you admire his knowledge or her knowledge, You are way ahead of the game. | |
| So how did I learn computer program? | |
| Back in the days when there were no books around for kids, there was no internet to learn, there were no videos. | |
| Well, I went to the computer lab and I admired, openly admired the knowledge of older kids who knew how to program and asked them for help. | |
| And then thanked them very much, got them a Coke to drink, whatever it was, some tendies. | |
| And so be open to being mentoring. | |
| Be mentored because there's no point having all this big knowledge if you don't put it out there in the world and experts love to teach people. | |
| They love to teach people. | |
| Be someone they love to teach and you will gain an education almost second to none. | |
| And please understand, you're worth investing in. | |
| You're worth investing in. | |
| You can do so much more than you imagine. | |
| You can do so much more than what the people around you think you can. | |
| Dream big, because what is the other alternative? | |
| The only alternative to dreaming big is to live this slow-motion waking nightmare of endless underachievement. |
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