getting things done since 1994
It's fair to say that I'm not normal. At this point, I could launch into a long diatribe about how normal is an abstract construct, cannot be defined, is misleading, blah, blah, blah. But I won't. For my purposes normal = most people. If most people do it, I'll consider it the norm.
Rather than going into all the reasons why I am different (a recipe for a very long and not very interesting post), I'll limit the scope of this entry to the thoughts that were inspired by the following assertion made by Paul Graham in his essay, What You'll Wish You'd Known: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.
I was reading this essay on the advice of a family friend and agree that the piece provides relevant and unpretentious advice that most high school students ought to heed (but won't because most high school students don't know that Paul Graham exists). In any case, when I got to the last paragraph I was struck by the realization that I've needed to get things done since I was around 13, a full ten years ahead of what Paul Graham deems to be the norm. I'm not normal.
I stopped to wonder why I was ahead of schedule and I chalked it up to a combination of my goal-oriented and practical personality and my parents. As far back as I can remember, my parents made it known that they would not be paying for my post-secondary education. That was up to me. And I wanted to pursue post-secondary education. University had always been a goal because I eventually wanted to land the kind of job that is typically awarded to a candidate with a post-secondary education (I suppose that, in line with the Paul Graham worldview, post-secondary education is not really a requirement for the type of job I wanted, but the idea of creating my own job by becoming an entrepreneur was not one I had considered).
Sure, I could've pursued post-secondary education without financial assistance from my parents while maintaining the lifestyle of the typical teenager described by Paul Graham and, as a result, not gotten anything done. I could have done what many students do and gone into student debt. When I started school, I took out student loans as a contingency, but I never used them. I paid them all back as soon as I finished school.
My student loans remained unused largely because of my parents and the custom savings plan they devised. When I started babysitting and earning more than my allowance (which, for the record, was $1 for washing dishes, making lunches, and doing other household chores that alternated between Kathryn and I and $2 if I vacuumed my room too), my parents established a very basic savings plan: for every dollar I put into savings towards my post-secondary education, they would deposit a dollar to match it. The promise of having all my earnings doubled proved to be a fantastic incentive to work and to save.
So I worked and I saved throughout high school. I developed a work ethic. I padded the reserves I'd need to draw on when I moved to Montreal to begin CEGEP at 17. I continued to work throughout CEGEP and my undergrad. No summers off. No traveling (with the exception of a trip to Barbados for three credits and a fiscally conservative week in Daytona Beach for spring break that involved 54 hours of bus travel, many microwave meals, and no excursions to Disneyland or to clubs for the simple reason that my budget didn't allow for it). When I read the itinerary posted by Lily the other day, I realized that I wish that I could've found a way to integrate travel into my life during those years. But, instead, I was getting things done. And my job as the assistant manager at the Dairy Queen didn't offer vacation benefits.
In any case, I'm happy to fall outside of the norm described by Paul Graham for a multitude of reasons. For starters, I'm not struggling under the burden of a massive student loan debt. The tons of invaluable experience I've gained and the great lessons I've learned as a result are icing on the cake.
