What You'll Wish You'd Known -- Paul Graham

January 2005

Paul Graham 保罗·格拉厄姆，硅谷教父，美国创业企业孵化器Y Combinator创始人。其中最著名的投资项目是Airbnb。

本文是保罗·格拉厄姆在一次高中活动上的讲话稿，旨在给高中同学以新的启发与思考。原文发表在其官方微博上，链接：http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

本文仍从英语、管理等角度出发，感受硅谷大佬的人生智慧，融入当下新时势，得出不一样的体会。

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(I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.)

When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious. What will you say to high school students? So I asked them, what do you wish someone had told you in high school? Their answers were remarkably similar. So I'm going to tell you what we all wish someone had told us.

大佬一开口就是主题：那些年你希望有人告诉你的事。

Wish是个很奇妙的词，跟Hope不一样。Wish一般指你期望（却无力实现的事情）。比如说：I wish there will be no homework anymore. 所以你只能是Wish，而不是Hope。因为Hope是有希望的，能实现的东西。

因此，大佬就想借助这个Speech，给高中生们醍醐灌顶，指点一二，谈谈人生大道理。

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.

“先别着急去思考你应该做什么。”大佬说，“这只是大人们和你聊天的一个启动”。意思是，其实他们只是想找你聊天而已，没什么。

poke a hermit crab in a tide pool：大佬在这里用了一个比喻。Hermit crab指的是沙子下隐藏的蟹。In a tide pool指的是，当潮水褪去后，（才知道谁在luo泳）那些隐藏着的蟹就无处可藏，必须露出真面目了。

一整句话的意思是，大人们问你“以后想干嘛”，其实是想了解你，想和你开启对话。

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.

这段话堪称是全文的重点兼亮点了。大佬说，如果我能回到过去，（试着抱你在怀里），我一定会更了解我有什么Options。莫慌，先找到你喜欢什么，再去做，这样你才能做好。

Option，可以理解为选项、选择。但我可以说，是“可选择权”。尽管有一丢丢不一样，但我想在此着重强调“可选择权”。

在张潇雨老师的课程中，在讲解到亚马逊和杰夫贝佐斯的商业哲学时，张老师说了以下内容：

”你可能听过《黑天鹅》这本书，它的作者是纳西姆·塔勒布（Nassim Nicholas Taleb），当代最重要的思想家之一。塔勒布这个人写过的几本书都很有意思，从《随机漫步的傻瓜》，到《黑天鹅》，到《反脆弱》，都很畅销。

而且塔勒布这几本书的思想一以贯之，讲的都是一件事，其核心就是一个英文单词，叫：Optionality。这个词其实严格来讲是个金融行业自造的词，我们就翻译成“可选择权”吧。

塔勒布的“可选择权”概念，建立在三个认知之上：

第一个认知是，我们对这个世界会发生什么是难以预测的。

第二个认知是，一件事情的结果和产生的影响是非线性的。

最后一个认知是，面对无法预测的非线性世界，我们应该制造“可选择权”（Optionality），让我们尽可能地暴露在好的“黑天鹅”的事件中。”

张老师最后补充：“这个“可选择权”最核心的意义是，它可能面临的损失是可以承受并且有下限的，但是万一好的“黑天鹅”发生，它带来回报的上限可以非常非常高，甚至是上不封顶的。”

意思是，我们要在生活中不断创造“可选择性”，然后等待“黑天鹅”的到来。

好的，讲回大佬的发言。大佬意思是，你要知道你有什么选择，且不要着急去选。去发掘你喜欢做的事情，说不定就做成了。果然大佬们的思考都是高度相同的，不信你细品，这不就是“可选择权”？在高中这么美好的岁月，多尝试（因为下限和损失都很低），说不定你就可以等到一只“黑天鹅”。

对于我们一把年纪的人，有什么思考呢？同理，无论年岁如何，都应保持尝试，做热爱的事，然后静待一束花开。

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. [1]

因为你（在此刻，高中时）很难去得到大部分工作的真正的面貌。所以你们现在决定将来要做什么，看起来很容易，实际是非常难的。

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.

你最好不要有一成不变的计划。老话说的好，最大的不变就是变化本身。有许多工作还没诞生，你根本不知道你要做什么。

时代在飞速发展，越来越多的工作在改变，在新生。各种细分领域的工作在不断的冒出来。回应上一段的内容，You don’t know the jobs.

And yet every May, speakers all over the country fire up the Standard Graduation Speech, the theme of which is: don't give up on your dreams. I know what they mean, but this is a bad way to put it, because it implies you're supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on. The computer world has a name for this: premature optimization. And it is synonymous with disaster. These speakers would do better to say simply, don't give up.

每年毕业季的大佬们发言，总会说，别放弃你们的梦想！说起来真好听。但保罗在这里强调，其实不是这样的，你们能做到别放弃就行。正如刚刚所说，外面发展变化太快，你的计划与梦想可能已经落后。

Premature optimization过早的优化，是个计算机术语，但是人生中随处可见。比如说：报名健身，在第一节课还没上的时候就先跑去把全套装备都买齐——当然包括很多第一节课之后就发现买错了的，以及因为实际上没上过几节课之后就再也不去了所以永远堆在仓房中的剩下的全部。（参考资料：https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/24310936）

大佬苦口婆心的说，别着急，莫慌，太阳下山有月光。

What they really mean is, don't get demoralized. Don't think that you can't do what other people can. And I agree you shouldn't underestimate your potential. People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.

这段话非常有意思。保罗先说，那些大佬们其实是想让你们不要demoralized（泄气，士气低落）。大佬们说，你们别摆烂了，也不要低估你们的实力，也别老是觉得你不如别人。看起来那些厉害的人已经赢在了起跑线（race apart），这都怪那些名人传记成功学的夸张描述。为了这些书好卖，作者们不得不进行名人崇拜、脑补整个成功的过程（can't help streamlining the plot）和归因到某些先天因素（can't help streamlining the plot）。

大佬说，别信。就算爱因斯坦是你的同班同学，你也发现不了他有什么不一样。总之，那些厉害的人并没有传说中这么厉害，都是夸张描述的。

Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good.

但是有多少人能意识到，其实厉害的人也要付出很多努力呢？我们总喜欢说人家投胎好，这只是给自己偷懒找的借口而已。

I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.

反正你偷懒找的借口永远是对的。

So far we've cut the Standard Graduation Speech down from "don't give up on your dreams" to "what someone else can do, you can do." But it needs to be cut still further. There is some variation in natural ability. Most people overestimate its role, but it does exist. If I were talking to a guy four feet tall whose ambition was to play in the NBA, I'd feel pretty stupid saying, you can do anything if you really try. [2]

现在故事线来到，大佬们在毕业典礼上说的“不要放弃你的梦想”，我们应该改成：“人家能做到的，你也能做到”。当然，这里面也有一些自然因素，不可高估自己。

We need to cut the Standard Graduation Speech down to, "what someone else with your abilities can do, you can do; and don't underestimate your abilities." But as so often happens, the closer you get to the truth, the messier your sentence gets. We've taken a nice, neat (but wrong) slogan, and churned it up like a mud puddle. It doesn't make a very good speech anymore. But worse still, it doesn't tell you what to do anymore. Someone with your abilities? What are your abilities?

“人家能做到的，你也能做到”这句话应该再进一步修改成：“假如别人拥有和你同样的能力做到了某事，你也可以做到。切勿低估你的能力”。大佬在这段强调你的能力。最后发问：究竟你有什么能力？

Upwind

I think the solution is to work in the other direction. Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.

为了解答这个问题，大佬认为，我们应该从另一个方向出发。我们不必从目标从后往前推要怎么一步步做，大佬们都是从现在出发，去往一个最好的情况而努力。

In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.

此刻，我们需思考20年后我们变成什么样，那就要问我现在需要做什么才能到达那里。大佬建议，与其做vain promise（空头的答应），不如想想你现在有什么“可选择”？这些“选择”能不能带你去更好的地方。

It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.

同样发人深省。你现在做什么，其实不重要。重要的是，做你喜欢做的事情，且能够提高你的“可选择权”，然后再去思考你会接受什么。

目前年轻人就业难是大问题。但这些年轻人有没有想过，读书的时候浪费了多少时间而没有好好的锻造自己？有没有更多的“可选择权”？没有的话，不如脚踏实地，沉下心来，先接受一个offer去尝试。毕竟下限低，“黑天鹅”仍然存在。

Suppose you're a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.

Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn't have an engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitudes. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for "don't give up on your dreams." Stay upwind.

Glider滑翔机，特指没有动力来源，需要母机带到上空，然后再借助风力降落的机器设备。假如你降落的太快，就可能错过好的风景，好的降落地点。因此，大佬建议，我们应该保持向上，乘风前行。所以“不要放弃你的梦想”还可以替换成“乘风向上”。

How do you do that, though? Even if math is upwind of economics, how are you supposed to know that as a high school student?

Well, you don't, and that's what you need to find out. Look for smart people and hard problems. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you can find such a clump, it's probably worthwhile to join it. But it's not straightforward to find these, because there is a lot of faking going on.

要怎么样才能“乘风向上”？找到最优秀的人和最难的问题，然后加入他们。

To a newly arrived undergraduate, all university departments look much the same. The professors all seem forbiddingly intellectual and publish papers unintelligible to outsiders. But while in some fields the papers are unintelligible because they're full of hard ideas, in others they're deliberately written in an obscure way to seem as if they're saying something important. This may seem a scandalous proposition, but it has been experimentally verified, in the famous Social Text affair. Suspecting that the papers published by literary theorists were often just intellectual-sounding nonsense, a physicist deliberately wrote a paper full of intellectual-sounding nonsense, and submitted it to a literary theory journal, which published it.

大佬在这里提醒所有的准大学生们，不要被大学里面的教室或大牛吓到。有时候他们是故意繁文缛节来显示他们的研究很重要（下划线的句子）。

The best protection is always to be working on hard problems. Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't. Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense.

最好的方法就是做最难的事情。大佬说，那什么是难的？难意味着你要焦虑和担忧。比如说你不用担心它出来的结果是不好的，那这就不是难的事。

意思是，这件事的结果与你无关的话，那就不是难的。就算最后错了你也没关系，那肯定不是一件难的事情。尽管事情很小，我们都必须做好，这就不是一件简单的事了。

Well, this seems a grim view of the world, you may think. What I'm telling you is that you should worry? Yes, but it's not as bad as it sounds. It's exhilarating to overcome worries. You don't see faces much happier than people winning gold medals. And you know why they're so happy? Relief.

I'm not saying this is the only way to be happy. Just that some kinds of worry are not as bad as they sound.

焦虑担忧？那我应该焦虑吗？其实克服它们是更值得让你开心的。有时一些焦虑和担忧并不是一件坏事。

Ambition

In practice, "stay upwind" reduces to "work on hard problems." And you can start today. I wish I'd grasped that in high school.

“乘风向上”可以简化成“做难的事”。

Most people like to be good at what they do. In the so-called real world this need is a powerful force. But high school students rarely benefit from it, because they're given a fake thing to do. When I was in high school, I let myself believe that my job was to be a high school student. And so I let my need to be good at what I did be satisfied by merely doing well in school.

If you'd asked me in high school what the difference was between high school kids and adults, I'd have said it was that adults had to earn a living. Wrong. It's that adults take responsibility for themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it. Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.

If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job. I don't mean that I'd slack in school. Working at something as a day job doesn't mean doing it badly. It means not being defined by it. I mean I wouldn't think of myself as a high school student, just as a musician with a day job as a waiter doesn't think of himself as a waiter. [3] And when I wasn't working at my day job I'd start trying to do real work.

Slack，粤语里面的蛇王究竟是不是跟这个有关系。暂未查证。意思是偷懒的，倦怠的等。大佬说，假如我能重来，我会把高中变成一个额外工作（a day job,不是白天工作或一天工作的意思，指的是a job that you do to earn money so that you can do something else that you prefer but that does not pay you much money，来源：牛津词典）。

When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they nearly all say the same thing: that they wasted so much time. If you're wondering what you're doing now that you'll regret most later, that's probably it. [4]

浪费时间是最大的后悔。

Some people say this is inevitable — that high school students aren't capable of getting anything done yet. But I don't think this is true. And the proof is that you're bored. You probably weren't bored when you were eight. When you're eight it's called "playing" instead of "hanging out," but it's the same thing. And when I was eight, I was rarely bored. Give me a back yard and a few other kids and I could play all day.

The reason this got stale in middle school and high school, I now realize, is that I was ready for something else. Childhood was getting old.

Stale: 不新鲜，陈腐的了

I'm not saying you shouldn't hang out with your friends — that you should all become humorless little robots who do nothing but work. Hanging out with friends is like chocolate cake. You enjoy it more if you eat it occasionally than if you eat nothing but chocolate cake for every meal. No matter how much you like chocolate cake, you'll be pretty queasy after the third meal of it. And that's what the malaise one feels in high school is: mental queasiness. [5]

如有友伴，如有蜜糕，不可贪食，不可不食。

You may be thinking, we have to do more than get good grades. We have to have extracurricular activities. But you know perfectly well how bogus most of these are. Collecting donations for a charity is an admirable thing to do, but it's not hard. It's not getting something done. What I mean by getting something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to draw the human face from life. This sort of thing rarely translates into a line item on a college application.

Bogus：假的。大佬在这里说，高中生是不是一定要有好成绩，要有好多课外活动呢？其实不是的，因为这些课外活动不难，不能让你有足够的进步，不能在你的大学申请画下浓墨重彩的一笔。

Corruption

It's dangerous to design your life around getting into college, because the people you have to impress to get into college are not a very discerning audience. At most colleges, it's not the professors who decide whether you get in, but admissions officers, and they are nowhere near as smart. They're the NCOs of the intellectual world. They can't tell how smart you are. The mere existence of prep schools is proof of that.

Few parents would pay so much for their kids to go to a school that didn't improve their admissions prospects. Prep schools openly say this is one of their aims. But what that means, if you stop to think about it, is that they can hack the admissions process: that they can take the very same kid and make him seem a more appealing candidate than he would if he went to the local public school. [6]

Right now most of you feel your job in life is to be a promising college applicant. But that means you're designing your life to satisfy a process so mindless that there's a whole industry devoted to subverting it. No wonder you become cynical. The malaise you feel is the same that a producer of reality TV shows or a tobacco industry executive feels. And you don't even get paid a lot.

Subvert: v. 颠覆; 暗中破坏; 使背叛; 使变节; 策反;

Cynical: adj. 愤世嫉俗的;

So what do you do? What you should not do is rebel. That's what I did, and it was a mistake. I didn't realize exactly what was happening to us, but I smelled a major rat. And so I just gave up. Obviously the world sucked, so why bother?

Smell a rat: to recognize that something is not as it appears to be or that something dishonest is happening（来源：牛津词典）；意思是：发觉有可疑之处，感到其中有诈。

世俗混乱，无谓烦心，做好自己，问心无愧。

When I discovered that one of our teachers was herself using Cliff's Notes, it seemed par for the course. Surely it meant nothing to get a good grade in such a class.

In retrospect this was stupid. It was like someone getting fouled in a soccer game and saying, hey, you fouled me, that's against the rules, and walking off the field in indignation. Fouls happen. The thing to do when you get fouled is not to lose your cool. Just keep playing.

Indignation: anger about a situation that you think is wrong or not fair（来源：牛津词典）；愤慨，激怒。

By putting you in this situation, society has fouled you. Yes, as you suspect, a lot of the stuff you learn in your classes is crap. And yes, as you suspect, the college admissions process is largely a charade. But like many fouls, this one was unintentional. [7] So just keep playing.

Charade: an act or event that is clearly false（来源：牛津词典）

Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do. The best plan, I think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. Don't just do what they tell you, and don't just refuse to. Instead treat school as a day job. As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet. You're done at 3 o'clock, and you can even work on your own stuff while you're there.

Curiosity

And what's your real job supposed to be? Unless you're Mozart, your first task is to figure that out. What are the great things to work on? Where are the imaginative people? And most importantly, what are you interested in? The word "aptitude" is misleading, because it implies something innate. The most powerful sort of aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests are often acquired tastes.

Aptitude: 天资，天赋的才能

大佬说，你们现在应该做的事情，还是找到什么是你们喜欢的。哪有什么天生注定的，最好的“天生注定”是把热情和兴趣放在某些问题上。

A distorted version of this idea has filtered into popular culture under the name "passion." I recently saw an ad for waiters saying they wanted people with a "passion for service." The real thing is not something one could have for waiting on tables. And passion is a bad word for it. A better name would be curiosity.

Kids are curious, but the curiosity I mean has a different shape from kid curiosity. Kid curiosity is broad and shallow; they ask why at random about everything. In most adults this curiosity dries up entirely. It has to: you can't get anything done if you're always asking why about everything. But in ambitious adults, instead of drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep. The mud flat morphs into a well.

作为一个有好奇心的大人，与其流水而过，不如刨根问底，专精专深。

Curiosity turns work into play. For Einstein, relativity wasn't a book full of hard stuff he had to learn for an exam. It was a mystery he was trying to solve. So it probably felt like less work to him to invent it than it would seem to someone now to learn it in a class.

好奇心能把工作变成玩乐。

One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee.

Flog：鞭打，鞭笞

你从学校学到的，做事需要自律，这可能是个最危险的描述。大佬说，学校为什么要你们自律呢，还不是因为这些内容太无聊了。

Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in. One still hasn't sent out his half of the thank-you notes from his wedding, four years ago. Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox.

相反，我认识的很多大佬都不是自律的人，有着非常严重的拖延症和几乎不可能强迫他们做不喜欢的事情

I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You probably need about the amount you need to go running. I'm often reluctant to go running, but once I do, I enjoy it. And if I don't run for several days, I feel ill. It's the same with people who do great things. They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.

Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having fun. That's why he's so good.

If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity about a promising question. The critical moment for Einstein was when he looked at Maxwell's equations and said, what the hell is going on here?

哎呀，我也不是叫你们不要自律啦。只是当你开始了，兴趣会大于自律，那么自律就没必要存在了呀。难道莎士比亚每天都在咬紧牙关的写（gritting his teeth）？当然不是，他在获得乐趣。如果你想做好工作，你需要的是对一个有前途的问题的极大好奇心。

It can take years to zero in on a productive question, because it can take years to figure out what a subject is really about. To take an extreme example, consider math. Most people think they hate math, but the boring stuff you do in school under the name "mathematics" is not at all like what mathematicians do.

Zero in=target=concentrate

大佬在这里说，你需要对某件有产出（有意义的）事情持续投入，才能发现它的庐山真面目。比如你以为你学的数学就是数学？天真了吧。

The great mathematician G. H. Hardy said he didn't like math in high school either. He only took it up because he was better at it than the other students. Only later did he realize math was interesting — only later did he start to ask questions instead of merely answering them correctly.

When a friend of mine used to grumble because he had to write a paper for school, his mother would tell him: find a way to make it interesting. That's what you need to do: find a question that makes the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's compellingly mysterious.

Grumble v. 咕哝; 嘟囔; 发牢骚

大佬再次强调说，你要找到一个可以使整个世界更加有趣的问题。大佬们都是这样的。他们看世界与他人无异，但能发现其中的异常之处。

And not only in intellectual matters. Henry Ford's great question was, why do cars have to be a luxury item? What would happen if you treated them as a commodity? Franz Beckenbauer's was, in effect, why does everyone have to stay in his position? Why can't defenders score goals too?

Now

If it takes years to articulate great questions, what do you do now, at sixteen? Work toward finding one. Great questions don't appear suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes them congeal is experience. So the way to find great questions is not to search for them — not to wander about thinking, what great discovery shall I make? You can't answer that; if you could, you'd have made it.

Congeal: to become thick or solid 动词，变稠，凝结

当然需要很多年才能找到那个“好问题”。作为年轻人，需要做什么呢？大佬说，去寻找就好。好的问题不会一刹那出来，只会通过经验在你的脑海里面逐渐凝结。你不必去搜索，不必去胡思乱想，思考我能发现什么，毕竟你也无法回答。要是你能回答，你也早已回答。

The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost. Einstein, Ford, and Beckenbauer all used this recipe. They all knew their work like a piano player knows the keys. So when something seemed amiss to them, they had the confidence to notice it.

大佬接着说，获得这个好问题好想法并不是去掠寻，而是把你的精力放在做你自己喜欢的事情，同时保持对这个世界的开放。大佬们都是用的这招（我现在告诉你们了）。

Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something, or to answer some question. Choose a project that will take less than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish. Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This could take years.)

Chunk 一大块

那把精力和时间放在哪里呢？找到一个项目，花小于一个月的时间去做一些能有意义的完成的事情。做一些足够难的事情去抓住你。

It may be just as well not to do a project "for school," if that will restrict you or make it seem like work. Involve your friends if you want, but not too many, and only if they're not flakes. Friends offer moral support (few startups are started by one person), but secrecy also has its advantages. There's something pleasing about a secret project. And you can take more risks, because no one will know if you fail.

Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be on the path to some goal you're supposed to have. Paths can bend a lot more than you think. So let the path grow out the project. The most important thing is to be excited about it, because it's by doing that you learn.

万一项目和你预期不一，你也不要担心。大佬说，道路都是曲折的，到路自己找路就行，你从中学到东西就好。

Don't disregard unseemly motivations. One of the most powerful is the desire to be better than other people at something. Hardy said that's what got him started, and I think the only unusual thing about him is that he admitted it. Another powerful motivator is the desire to do, or know, things you're not supposed to. Closely related is the desire to do something audacious. Sixteen year olds aren't supposed to write novels. So if you try, anything you achieve is on the plus side of the ledger; if you fail utterly, you're doing no worse than expectations. [8]

Audacious adj. 大胆的, 有冒险精神的

Motivation激励是很重要的。大佬说，其中一个最重要的motivation是你渴望在某些地方比某些人要做的更好。另外一个是渴望去做，去探寻那些你不必做的事情，比如大胆的做一些事。在是十六岁的年纪，你不必去写小说。但是你写了的话，就是在人生账单的右边加上一笔（意思是对你有意义，有增量）。假如你失败了，也没有损失什么，也没有比预期更产生更坏的结果。

大佬的意思还是前面讲的“可选择权”Options。尽管去做，等“黑天鹅”这种上限可能无限高的事情发生，假如没有实现，也不会有多少损失。

Beware of bad models. Especially when they excuse laziness. When I was in high school I used to write "existentialist" short stories like ones I'd seen by famous writers. My stories didn't have a lot of plot, but they were very deep. And they were less work to write than entertaining ones would have been. I should have known that was a danger sign. And in fact I found my stories pretty boring; what excited me was the idea of writing serious, intellectual stuff like the famous writers.

Now I have enough experience to realize that those famous writers actually sucked. Plenty of famous people do; in the short term, the quality of one's work is only a small component of fame. I should have been less worried about doing something that seemed cool, and just done something I liked. That's the actual road to coolness anyway.

大佬说，你不应该担心做的那件事是不是够酷，做你自己喜欢的事情就好。这才是“酷”的正确路径。

A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is to find good books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad. [9] So don't assume a subject is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. You have to search actively for the tiny number of good books.

去找到有用的书来做你的项目吧。但是大部分教科书都非常糟糕，你应该去搜索一小部分的那些真正好的书。

The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn.

Your life doesn't have to be shaped by admissions officers. It could be shaped by your own curiosity. It is for all ambitious adults. And you don't have to wait to start. In fact, you don't have to wait to be an adult. There's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age. [10]

你的生活不应该是被“大学录取官”来定义。你应该由你的好奇心来塑造你的生活。你并不是在某大学毕业后就突然变成大人了。你可以随时变成大人，只要你开始对自己负责。

This may sound like bullshit. I'm just a minor, you may think, I have no money, I have to live at home, I have to do what adults tell me all day long. Well, most adults labor under restrictions just as cumbersome, and they manage to get things done. If you think it's restrictive being a kid, imagine having kids.

The only real difference between adults and high school kids is that adults realize they need to get things done, and high school kids don't. That realization hits most people around 23. But I'm letting you in on the secret early. So get to work. Maybe you can be the first generation whose greatest regret from high school isn't how much time you wasted.

大佬最后总结，大部分人在23岁左右才意识到，作为成人，是需要努力把事情完成，对事情负责。但这次演讲后，你们也知道了这个秘密。未来你们也将不会因为浪费你们高中时间而后悔。

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总结

作为硅谷最有影响力的投资人，保罗·格拉厄姆以及他的YC孵化器影响着许多的硅谷创业者。保罗·格拉厄姆在这篇对高中同学的演讲中，以简单、风趣的语言风格，结合自己的人生经历和思考，向未成年的高中同学娓娓道来。

保罗·格拉厄姆先生在演讲中，不断强调自己的可选择权，找到一件自己喜欢的事情并投入经历去做。同时，不要害怕别人的看法，做好自己的事情，对事情和自己负责，就是一个成人的标准。

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我为什么会挑选这篇内容

张潇雨老师在他的专栏中有大量笔墨介绍了保罗·格拉厄姆和他的YC孵化器。在Airbnb的介绍中，着重强调了这个孵化器对创新企业的帮助。保罗·格拉厄姆会认为这个孵化器是个Campus校园，是一个投资人和企业家创业者共同进步的地方，而不是单向的资金投入，只关注产出的投资机构。

在偶尔一次刷公众号时，有人推荐了这篇内容。于是我找出来原文，读了两遍，结合当下的势态和我对商业的思考，对这篇内容做了一个简单的解读。时间有限加上笔者的能力有限，本次的分享就告一段落。

最后，保罗·格拉厄姆在后面有更多的脚注补充，我认为这些内容更有深度。欢迎你继续阅读，然后与我沟通交流。

【E介俗人】2022/09/12

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Notes

[1] A doctor friend warns that even this can give an inaccurate picture. "Who knew how much time it would take up, how little autonomy one would have for endless years of training, and how unbelievably annoying it is to carry a beeper?"

[2] His best bet would probably be to become dictator and intimidate the NBA into letting him play. So far the closest anyone has come is Secretary of Labor.

[3] A day job is one you take to pay the bills so you can do what you really want, like play in a band, or invent relativity.

Treating high school as a day job might actually make it easier for some students to get good grades. If you treat your classes as a game, you won't be demoralized if they seem pointless.

However bad your classes, you need to get good grades in them to get into a decent college. And that is worth doing, because universities are where a lot of the clumps of smart people are these days.

[4] The second biggest regret was caring so much about unimportant things. And especially about what other people thought of them.

I think what they really mean, in the latter case, is caring what random people thought of them. Adults care just as much what other people think, but they get to be more selective about the other people.

I have about thirty friends whose opinions I care about, and the opinion of the rest of the world barely affects me. The problem in high school is that your peers are chosen for you by accidents of age and geography, rather than by you based on respect for their judgement.

[5] The key to wasting time is distraction. Without distractions it's too obvious to your brain that you're not doing anything with it, and you start to feel uncomfortable. If you want to measure how dependent you've become on distractions, try this experiment: set aside a chunk of time on a weekend and sit alone and think. You can have a notebook to write your thoughts down in, but nothing else: no friends, TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, books, newspapers, or magazines. Within an hour most people will feel a strong craving for distraction.

[6] I don't mean to imply that the only function of prep schools is to trick admissions officers. They also generally provide a better education. But try this thought experiment: suppose prep schools supplied the same superior education but had a tiny (.001) negative effect on college admissions. How many parents would still send their kids to them?

It might also be argued that kids who went to prep schools, because they've learned more, are better college candidates. But this seems empirically false. What you learn in even the best high school is rounding error compared to what you learn in college. Public school kids arrive at college with a slight disadvantage, but they start to pull ahead in the sophomore year.

(I'm not saying public school kids are smarter than preppies, just that they are within any given college. That follows necessarily if you agree prep schools improve kids' admissions prospects.)

[7] Why does society foul you? Indifference, mainly. There are simply no outside forces pushing high school to be good. The air traffic control system works because planes would crash otherwise. Businesses have to deliver because otherwise competitors would take their customers. But no planes crash if your school sucks, and it has no competitors. High school isn't evil; it's random; but random is pretty bad.

[8] And then of course there is money. It's not a big factor in high school, because you can't do much that anyone wants. But a lot of great things were created mainly to make money. Samuel Johnson said "no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." (Many hope he was exaggerating.)

[9] Even college textbooks are bad. When you get to college, you'll find that (with a few stellar exceptions) the textbooks are not written by the leading scholars in the field they describe. Writing college textbooks is unpleasant work, done mostly by people who need the money. It's unpleasant because the publishers exert so much control, and there are few things worse than close supervision by someone who doesn't understand what you're doing. This phenomenon is apparently even worse in the production of high school textbooks.

[10] Your teachers are always telling you to behave like adults. I wonder if they'd like it if you did. You may be loud and disorganized, but you're very docile compared to adults. If you actually started acting like adults, it would be just as if a bunch of adults had been transposed into your bodies. Imagine the reaction of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being told they had to ask permission to go the bathroom, and only one person could go at a time. To say nothing of the things you're taught. If a bunch of actual adults suddenly found themselves trapped in high school, the first thing they'd do is form a union and renegotiate all the rules with the administration.

Thanks to Ingrid Bassett, Trevor Blackwell, Rich Draves, Dan Giffin, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Mark Nitzberg, Lisa Randall, and Aaron Swartz for reading drafts of this, and to many others for talking to me about high school.