Digression
One of my joys in life is mentoring kids, especially high school kids, and to that end, I give a speech annually to the high school seniors. I am taking the liberty of concluding my book with the following excerpt of the speech.
Lazslo Polgar was a Hungarian Jewish father of three girls, Susan, Sofia and Judith, ages 5, 3 and 1. One day his oldest daughter Susan saw a chess set on their game shelf and she asked what it was. Lazslo was not a good chess player, but he knew how to play and that day he taught Susan how to play. He saw a sparkle in Susan’s eye while playing. That evening, Lazslo said to his wife: See these three girls? These three girls are going to become the three greatest female chess champions ever.
And guess what, these three women became the three greatest women ever to play the game of chess. The youngest of them, Judith Polgar, became the greatest female player ever, and in a game dominated by male players, she is amongst the world’s best.
Lazslo has a saying that he lives by “Geniuses are made, not born”.
I agree with Lazslo wholeheartedly. As a result, it dismays me terribly when a high school senior has not decided to become the world’s greatest something, whatever that something is.
The reason it dismays me is that becoming that greatest something is a matter of trajectory. Every rung on the ladder is dependent upon what you did before that. If you want to become the next Ira Glass or Terry Gross or other world-class journalist, there is a path to becoming that. If you want to become the next Tim Ferriss, or the next Seth Godin, there is a path to that.
A lot of it depends on where you went right after university, and a lot of that depends upon what internships you did in the summers of college. And the best internships go to the people at the best colleges. If you are at Rutgers or Maryland, you’re not going to get a summer job at Google or Facebook or Bain or BCG or Guggenheim or Goldman Sachs, because those top places don’t bother recruiting at those schools. They’re recruiting at Yale and Princeton and. Columbia.
So I am really bothered when a high-school senior is in the room with a college guidance counselor, and their parents are there too, and the kid has a 26 ACT, and nothing to speak of on their resume, and the guidance counselor says, well this Ivy League school is a reach, so consider Maryland as a safety school, and the parents are nodding their heads up and down in agreement.
You only get one shot at a life: do you really want to settle for your safety school? It is an undisputed fact that the ACT is a test that you can study for. If in the next year, you composed a plan and followed it, there is no doubt that you could increase that score dramatically. And with a 34 or 35, there is a whole different class of university that you can get into. And that will change your whole trajectory of your life.
Of course a high ACT is not enough, you need to have done some extraordinary things too.
Some of you know Rachel Zietz. She went to high school in Boca Raton. She was on Shark Tank. Watch the video. Guess what, now she is at Princeton.
And her little brother is on his way to Shark Tank too. Watch that video.
How do you get on Shark Tank? Well, it’s all about making a plan, with an ultimate goal and then following it.
And that requires a non-family mentor. Go find a non-family mentor. Find someone who you aspire to be like. Then learn all about that person. Then approach the person, explain to them why you aspire to be like them, and ask them if they will be your mentor. Trust me, no one worth their salt will turn you down.
Your parents are the wrong people to be your mentors. Why are your parents the wrong people for this? Your parents have $300,000 invested in you so far, so they are thinking to themselves, well I want my kid to be able to make a living. But that’s not enough. Is your dream to become an accountant at KPMG and make $60,000 a year counting beans five years out of school? I hope not.
There are two parts to the trajectory equation. The first is where you start. The second is your rate of increase. Where you start means what college you go to.
The second part of the trajectory equation is rate of increase. That means that you decide now what you want to be. Let’s say, for example, you want to be the Governor of Florida one day. So set up meetings now with various elected officials, look at the resume of various governors and see what they did during their summer after high school and during their summers while at college. You can be sure that they included being a page in the Congress or in the State House, working on campaigns, and working in local Congressional constituent offices. And you can be sure it doesn’t include working at Camp Ruach. I bet if you asked Ted Deutch to mentor you, and you could show him you are knowledgeable, have done your homework and are serious, he would be only too happy to be your non-family mentor and guide you to your goals.
I came across an ad for a university. The tag line in the ad states “93% of our graduates are employed or in graduate school within six months.” This ad really disappoints me. What it doesn’t say is what the employment is. Are the graduates counting beans at KPMG or PWC for $40,000 a year? That’s not something to brag about. What graduate school are they in? Are they bragging, all our graduates got into Cardozo Law School and are condemned to ten years post-graduation dotting i’s and crossing t’s on legal contracts? What is their cheer there? Hurray, hurray, we’re #56!
I would much rather see an ad that says,
We graduated Mark Zuckerberg,
We graduated Sergey Brin,
We graduated Judith Polgar,
We graduated Neil Simon,
We graduated Lin-Manuel Miranda,
We graduated Seth Godin,
We graduated Tim Ferriss,
We graduated Rachel Zietz.
That would be something to brag about.
I am sorry to have sounded so preachy, but as a parent with five older children, all of whom are at the top of their game, I see so many of their friends with lousy options saying to themselves, wow I wish I would have had the right mentor when I was seventeen to help me plan things differently.
It’s not too late.
Thanks for reading my book. I hope you found it interesting and useful.
