I didn’t really enjoy my life. I wish I had tried to imagine how hard it would be to always be responsible and accountable. Even when I was having a great time, I was always wishing that I was the next step ahead, getting a driver’s license, getting a job, etc. I wish I had lived in those moments.
I had no idea how smart and pretty I was. I was horribly shy, even with girls, always thinking I couldn’t possibly measure up. I had a brief chubby period when I was 15 and from then on, I always felt “fat” even when I wasn’t.
I always regretted quitting sports. I had a big attitude problem in high school. I always wondered what my high school experience would have been like and how far I could have gone if I didn't let silly things get in my way. I honestly think I could have played college basketball.
I had a bit of an attitude problem in high school and college. My thinking went sort of like this. If I didn’t care about a class or find it interesting, I didn’t bother to put much work into it. I figured I would learn only what I cared about and skate by everywhere else.
This is a destructive attitude and if you have it, you must change. If you can even start to change now it will save you a lot of headaches in the work world.
Here’s why that view doesn’t work. In every job, there is the stuff you like and want to do and the stuff you hate but have to do anyway. And you must do both the stuff you like and the stuff you hate well.
By not doing the stuff you don’t like, you begin to set a pattern or a habit for yourself and that is very hard to change. For instance, when I didn’t like doing something in school, I got in the habit of putting it off to the last minute and often times, I ended up turning it in late. But in my job, I can’t be late. I have to make my deadlines or else.
And to this day, I have to fight the urge to procrastinate on things that I’d rather not do so I can work on things I want to do. It all has to get done and it all has to be done well. The sooner you can learn to put maximum effort into everything you need to do, whether you love to do it or hate to do it, the better for your career no matter what you end up doing.
This is an important one. I think there are a lot of high school and college kids who find they have trouble with a subject or a class or a concept and they simply think, “I guess I’m not any good at this.” And at that moment, it may be true. But you can master the things that give you trouble.
For instance, I’ve never liked talking on the phone. But journalists talk on the phone all day. In my first reporting job for a tiny newspaper in a small town, I would get so nervous if I had to call the mayor or the police chief or anyone of stature. I remember sitting at my desk and starting to dial the numbers but then hanging up quick. And mentally I’d have to give my self a little pep talk. “You can do it.” Then I’d try again. That just seems so funny to me now. Today, I don’t think twice about calling the school board president or the mayor or even the governor.
The point is, don’t write yourself off for any career now because you think you’re just not suited for it. Maybe you think you’re too shy or don’t write well enough to be a journalist. Well, you can learn and you can change and someday you’ll surprise yourself by how good you can get at something you never thought you’d be able to do.
When I was in my first newspaper job, I read an article giving advice for people who were just out of school. This was the one really good piece of advice from that column that stuck with me.
The author argued that you’ll need three years to learn any business and for the good work habits that will make you a good employee to really become automatic. I think this is very true. If you’re jumping from job to job early on, you may never get the basic background understanding of how the business you’re in really works and you’ll need to understand that later on.
So there it is. What did I leave out? What do you wish you knew in high school?
I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life. People are always asking you this, so you think you're supposed to have an answer. But adults ask this mainly as a conversation starter. They want to know what sort of person you are, and this question is just to get you talking. They ask it the way you might poke a hermit crab in a tide pool, to see what it does.
If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you do.
It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but it turns out to be hard, partly because it's hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs. Being a doctor is not the way it's portrayed on TV. Fortunately you can also watch real doctors, by volunteering in hospitals.
But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them yet. Most of the work I've done in the last ten years didn't exist when I was in high school. The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.
I wish I knew that things that went wrong in high school did not mean the world as I knew it was coming to an end. There is life after high school.