[not written with AI] Last week, I spoke to dozens of people still in or just out of college. Good ones too (Harvard, MIT and the like). They were anxious. They were promised that they just needed to study to get into a good college, graduate with a high GPA in a good major, get a high paying job in a big city, and eventually buy a house and start a family. But that promise broke. They all believe there is going to be a “permanent underclass” and they want to escape it.
There is some truth to this. The reality is that there are fewer jobs for qualified graduates than ever before. And the ones that exist don't seem to set you up for a path to financial freedom. BigTech hiring has plateaued for 4 years now. In the last month, I've had several startups tell me unironically what you hear from X AI hype machines: “I really don't need to hire junior engineers right now, I'd rather spend the money on Claude Code.” Other industries don't paint a rosier picture. There's a sense that most kinds of knowledge work at a desk will eventually be automated away. Many who have benefitted from the AI wave and technology in the last 10 years have made north of $10M while most students struggle to even break into a job that pays $100k a year. Every single student wants to “start a startup”, not because they have an all-consuming itch to create, but because it feels like the only path to financial freedom.
I don't know the systemic solution to all these problems. But if I were a student today, here's what I would do.
— Time is the only limited resource left. You can't afford to waste it. Networking, events, and “talking about doing things” have limited value. Too many people spend cycles trying to appear and sound smart. Too much time on social media. Too much Netflix. Too many people dream about “building a company” without ever going deep enough into anything to have a real unique insight. You must protect your time like someone's trying to steal it. Treat time like actual money in your wallet. Every day, you need at least 4 hours of protected, alone, do-not-disturb time to do your personal work. This is your “work” time.
— Exploit. Use 70% of your “work” time to focus on one deep area, consistently. This must be for 3 to 6 months at a stretch, minimum. Every single student I met was way too distracted. One day, they cared about X, the next about Y. They let their feeds, their friends and the news cycle decide what they cared about that day. You need to pick a lane and go deep. I'm not prescriptive about what this means. It doesn't have to mean “building something”. It could be deep research into a topic. It could be answering a question like Hell, it could be starting a podcast. But it has to be one thing. You can learn most of what you need from LLMs and actually reading the underlying sources.