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All right, this one's for all you youngsters in the audience, should you go to college. In this episode, we're going to take a deep look at the pros and cons of going to college. What some of the alternatives are, what some of the traps are, I'm going to give you the real scoop, a lot of truth that you're not going to hear anywhere else about the realities of college and whether it's worth it or not, you might be surprised at the conclusion that you reach, I'm going to give you a powerful alternative to college if you want to go down down that road. And we're basically going to explore everything you need to build the foundation for the rest of your life, right here. So this is powerful stuff, stick with me, this material can change the whole trajectory of your life. This is one of the reasons I love shooting content for people who are really young. Like if you're watching this, I'm assuming you're between the ages of 18 and 20. Somewhere around there in your teens. This is the perfect age at which to begin self actualization, you're going to have such a huge advantage over everybody else. So let's get into that. First of all, what are my qualifications for talking about this? Well, of course, I went to college, I finished a four year degree, I graduated as a philosophy major. I also studied aerospace engineering for two years, I was a straight A student through high school and through college, I took all the advanced classes in high school, all the AP classes, I took a bunch of advanced classes in university graduated, actually half a year early, within three and a half years, I finished my degree, and then moved on to other better things. And I'll be talking more about my story here. Because it's actually pretty interesting. I've gone through a lot of shifts in my career, multiple careers, I've probably gone through four or five different career changes, changing majors. At one point, I wanted to be actually a philosophy professor. And I was looking into that. So I looked at various kinds of possibilities. And then also, after I left university, I became a game designer, video game designer, professionally, I got paid to do that work that a great studio, then I switched from that to running my own online businesses, I did web development, I did online marketing. And now I'm doing self help spirituality philosophy through YouTube. So I've I've had a very interesting journey. I've devoted a significant amount of my life to try to figure out how to find the right direction in my life. And in the principles that I learned, I actually put into a course that I created a 25 hour course specifically about how to find your direction in life, it's called The Life Purpose course you can find it on my website. So I've helped 1000s of people, literally 1000s of people figure out their life purpose through my course. And through interacting with them. One on one coaching people, I also as a life coach in between all those things, I got certified for that, and I've coached many, many people on their issues. And a lot of people have this problem of not finding the proper direction in their life. So this is a real deep passion for me, because my whole life was really about trying to find my own sense of purpose. So really, this question of whether you should or shouldn't go to college, it's a much deeper question than just that. The problem is that society has just sort of programmed you with this idea that you should go to college, that's sort of what your parents want of you. That's probably what your teachers want of you what your mentors want of you, maybe your friends, your best friends, if they're academically inclined, they're probably shooting off to college and going through all the college prep work and all that rigmarole. So it's very easy just to get caught up in that like, being part of a sheep inside of a herd. And you just go along with all of your friends and what everybody is, is doing. And of course, all of the teachers in your school and your high school, if you're going to good high school, they're probably pushing you, you know, to take all the hard classes and then to take the SATs and get good grades and then apply to the best schools, right? So this can be a trap, you have to really carefully think about is this really going to lead me to what I ultimately want in my life? So we have to back up a step and sort of zoom out and take a meta perspective and ask ourselves, what is the point of all this? Why am I doing all this? Why am I reading all these books? Why am I going to all these courses? Why am I taking all these tests, jumping through all these hoops and going to these universities and then paying them 10s And even hundreds of 1000s of dollars for this? Is it really worth it? And of course the answer isn't so simple. It very much depends on what kind of life you want to lead. So the ultimate thing I want you to start to think about here is not so much about college don't focus so much about college, the College question focus more about really, the point of all this is, you want to build your life as quickly as possible. Right now you're in this critical transition period, between the ages of 18 and 24, let's say. And if you're not there yet, you're going to be there very soon. So this, this period in your life is the period in which you can make or break your whole life, the entire foundation for your life is getting set right now, really, between the ages, it starts even earlier than that between the ages of 15. And let's say, 25, this is where your whole life is being set. And most people, what they do is they piss this time away by playing video games, hanging out their friends, smoking weed, getting drunk, and all this sorts of stuff. And then just going through the motions, and just following along with the herd of what their friends and classmates and so forth are doing. This is a very big problem in our society, you need to start thinking independently and critically for yourself about what you want out of your life. And chances are, you're already behind the curve. Even if you're 18 years old, right now, you're it's already too late. In a certain sense, you should have started when you were 15, or even younger, thinking about once you want for your life. See, basically, it breaks down like this. If college is something that's going to lead to how you ultimately want to lead, lead your life, then go to college, otherwise don't. So what do I mean by this, if you're interested in in a very, sort of conventional traditional career track, and you are planning to actually make a full, lifelong career of 4050 years. In this conventional track, according to some major in college, like, you know, you want to be a physics professor, or you know, you want to be a scientist, you know, you want to be an academic, you want to be a historian, you want to be a scholar, you want to be a professional philosopher, you want to be an engineer, computer, you know, AI researcher, a doctor, a chemist, these sorts of fields and majors, if you know for sure that you want one of these than college is going to be necessary for you, basically, you can't avoid it, you have at the very least you need the certificates and all that just to go through that because like even engineering, you're probably not even gonna be able to get an engineering job without having some engineering certifications, which at least it's going to require a bachelor's degree, probably at the very least. So in that case, it's easy. And if you were that type of person, you probably wouldn't be watching this recording right now, the reason you're listening to this is because you're probably not so clear. You don't have clarity in your life about what you really want. You're waffling around, you're uncertain, you're undecided. As many freshmen are when they enter, university, they're undecided. They don't know what the hell they want. And so they're there. They're wasting the most critical period of their life, doing things without understanding what they're doing or why they're doing it. Make sure you don't fall into this trap. Right now, all of your time. And attention should be focused on not hanging around with your friends or playing video games, but sitting alone in a room by yourself for hours contemplating every single day for weeks, and for months. What do I want out of my life? And then what will be required to get what I want to get that thing that I want out of my life? How am I going to get there? What's a realistic plan? And of course, look, I was in your shoes at your age, to a certain degree. I was unclear exactly about what I wanted from university. I first entered undecided but then I also quickly went into aerospace engineering spent two years doing that. Then I switched two years into it to philosophy. And I'll tell you more about this story is as we go deeper in this episode, but anyways, just the point of it is, is that I know what it's like to struggle with this. And of course, it's difficult sometimes to know what you want out of life because to know that you have to have experience and at your age, you're so immature and so inexperienced that you don't really know what you want and many of the things that you might even think that you want, you discover later that that's not what you really want. And part of that is just trial and error. Testing stuff out, and seeing that isn't fit for you. But when you're going to do that, you have to do it. See there's a sort of a, an unconscious, lazy way of going about that. And then there's a conscious, proactive way of going about that, if you just let things unfold organically following the path of least resistance. And you do it unconsciously not proactively, then what's going to happen is, you're going to probably waste the next 510 years of your life, just, you know, making all sorts of moves that end in dead ends, and they don't lead you anywhere, you're going to waste the most precious years of your life. Right now you've got abundant health, if you're if you've been fortunate with that you've got energy, you're young, this is the time to really invest that into building the foundation for the rest of your life here. So the first thing I want you to see is that if you had that kind of crystal clarity about what you really want from your life, these sorts of questions wouldn't even arise for you, it'd be very easy for you to make decisions about whether you should go to college, what major you should select which classes you should select, and so forth. That would be very easy. Because you would know exactly what your end goal was. And then you wouldn't be listening to me probably. So you're probably unclear. And that is one of the things that you need to one of your meta lessons here is clarity. Clarity in life is critical. We're not just talking about how to get through college here, we're talking about how to ace all of life to ace all of life, you need to be crystal clear about what you want out of life. Otherwise, how can you get it? When you have even you don't know? How can other people give it to you? How can other people help you? How can all the resources that are necessary to make that happen? Come into your awareness if you're not clear and insistent about what you want. So the first lesson here is spend a lot of time contemplating and just trying to become as clear as possible. Now, you can't just do it all in your head, I'm not saying that you can just sit alone in a room and contemplate for the next 40 years, you know, into the future about what your life should be and plan it all out. That's not what I'm saying. This is an organic process that will have to unfold over five or 10 years or even more for you as you're trying to figure yourself out. Figure out who you are, and what you want out of life. And part of that is going to be making some tests and having some failures and going through various trials you need experience. So exposing yourself to more experience is, is crucial here. It's crucial. But also, it's not enough just to go bumbling into various things without contemplating you can accomplish a lot of work here and save yourself years and even perhaps decades and also 10s of 1000s of dollars just by sitting alone in a room and contemplating a little bit more than the average person is willing to do. See, don't go looking to your friends in school, for good role models about how to set up one's life. They don't know what the hell they're doing. See, they don't know what the hell they're doing. And your parents probably also don't know what the hell they're doing. And probably even your teachers don't know what the hell they're doing. They're stuck in some sort of job, that's just paying the bills. That's, that's not going to be sufficient for you to really excel in life. What we're talking about here is excelling in life. What we're talking about here is success, creating a deeply fulfilling life for yourself. And in order to do that, you need to understand yourself deeply. Which you don't, you might think that well, but Leo, I understand myself, I know what I like what I don't like, no you don't. You don't that your age, you can't possibly know that yet. You don't have sufficient experience. Here's other critical insight for you about this topic. Each one of us, even though we can look similar, and we can think that we're all human and of course we are. We're similar in many ways, but each one of us is also very unique. We have a unique constellation of personality traits, likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses. And God given gifts and talents, that it's our life's work here, just to be born is to undertake this life's work of discovering these strengths and weaknesses that you have discovering your own personality. Woody, becoming intimately familiar with that, and then constructing a life that is in alignment with that, and not at odds with it. Because if your life is going to be the kind of life that most people lead, then your life and your career will be at odds with each other, your unique strengths and gifts will not be fully actualized in the work that you do, and what we're talking about here is ultimately work, you're going to university, you're selecting a major, and then you got to somehow connect what you're going to be studying in university to the work that you're going to be doing after you get out of university. So we're talking about a career path for you here. And really beyond a career path, we're talking about a life purpose. See, you don't just want a career that pays you Well, that's not going to be fulfilling enough for you, no amount of money is sufficient to compensate you for 50 years of working in a career that you don't like and that you're not passionate about. You need to have deep passion, about your career. Whatever that is. And don't let anybody tell you what your career should be. Only you can decide that your parents can't decide that for you. One of the traps you're going to likely fall into is you're going to try to pick a career that your parents are going to pressure you into picking, because it's one of those careers That's very kind of bankable and tangible like engineering, programming, and becoming a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, this sorts of stuff. See, for these careers, these are well trodden careers. These careers have existed for hundreds of years, the university system is well designed to prepare you for entering one of these careers. But the problem is, is that if you're lukewarm about any of these careers, it's not going to work for you, you got to look for something that you're deeply, deeply passionate about and passion here, don't let anyone fool you. Passion is not a luxury, passion is an absolute necessity. Because we're talking about 50 years of working in this career, you can't excel at something for 50 years, when you're not deeply passionate about it, actually, by picking the career that you think is going to be the most profitable for you, but that you're lukewarm about you're not passionate about, you're actually over the next 50 years, you're going to lose millions of dollars of value, you see. Because if you would have picked the career that you were really passionate about, that you could spin off, and you can make millions of dollars doing that. Because your passion is what drives you. If you lose your drive and your motivation, because you're working some dead end job as a wage slave, then you're losing so much of your human potential, you have enormous creative human potential, all of us do. The problem is how do you tap into it? That's what's difficult. And nobody teaches you how to do this, which is why I created the course, my life purpose course 25 hours on this, there's a lot to say about it. I had to research all this stuff by myself through lots of trial and error over a period of 10 years. See, but nobody in your high school teaches you this stuff. Your parents don't teach you this life purpose stuff. Even in university, they won't teach you this life purpose stuff. So you have to spend more time figuring out who you are, as a personality, you're not even aware of your own personality. Yet at your age, once you start to figure that out, then you can start to figure out what will and won't work for you. And then you can work with your passions. And then you can start to tailor a career around that. Make your career and basically tailor your entire life specifically to who you are. That's what's going to lead to the best life possible for you. So I recommend that you stop screwing around, stop delaying, and really take this critical next five years of your life very, very seriously. This is your self discovery phase. This is where you're building the foundation for everything else. If you're unclear, get clear, it might take you years to get clear. I'm not saying you can get clear in a week or in a month. Now for those of you who are clear and you know for for sure that you want to be a lawyer and that's what you're passionate about. Because you want to be a judge in the future and you really love law of whatever you know, something like that. Okay, colleges is for you. It's perfect for you. But if if you're less solid about that, and you're also thinking about one of these sort of less tangible majors like maybe you want to be an English major or a philosophy major You're a psychology major, a sociology major, something where you're going to get that major, but then you're probably not getting a job in that major, like, you're probably not going to be an English professor or teacher, after you get your English degree, and you're probably not going to be a historian, after you get your history degree, that's a bit more problematic. And we're gonna spend a lot of time talking about how to how to deal with that kind of case. But of course, by all means, if you want to, if you clearly know that, for example, you want to be a professional psychologist, or a professional sociologist, or a professional historian, by all means, of course, go and do that. And then University is great for you. They've got you covered. But you have to think about where is your paycheck actually going to be coming from? After you graduate, if you're not thinking about that, you're screwing this whole thing up, you need a solid, tangible plan for your paycheck. Because if you don't have a solid tangible plan, I can tell you exactly what's going to happen and where your paycheck is going to come from. your paycheck is either going to come from your parents, who you will be mooching off of for a long, long time. And they probably won't like that. And you won't like it either. Because by by taking their money, you have to follow their rules, see their strings attached with their money, it's much better to live life, financially independent from your parents. So that's also a key goal that you should be thinking about is how to break out of your family move out and be on your own become an independent person, this is going to be huge for you. It's a game changer. This is where life gets really, really interesting is when you start to live by yourself without depending on others for financial support, it's also quite challenging to figure this out. So yeah, like I was saying, I can tell you what the default is going to be if you don't take what I'm saying you're seriously and you don't get clear very fast about your career and life purpose, you're going to end up in a dead end wage slave job, working at Starbucks, something along those lines. That's, that's even if you finish college. Insane. And if you get something like an engineering major, but then you realize that you don't like that, and you don't want to work as an engineer, guess what, you're going to become a wage slave working at Starbucks. And it's not going to be very fulfilling. Because your talents and your creative potential is all going to be going to waste as you're pouring that coffee for eight hours a day, and getting paid, you know, some minimum wage to do that. That is not a good way to live life. And the point of of earning a nice salary, which is going to come of course, from you, figuring out your career and being serious about it and developing your career. The point of earning a nice salary is not to have a bunch of money, or luxury, it's really to buy yourself freedom, the freedom to live your life according to your strengths, and your own unique personality and your passions and your top values. That's what the point of that is. I have an actual I have an episode called How to Escape wage slavery, where I go into more depth about this, this issue of wage slavery. It's it's a big problem that many youngsters don't think about until they get out of university and they realize, oh, wait a minute. I'm 25 years old, I just graduated. But I have no idea how am i I'm actually going to pay my bills, and I have to pay my bills. And hey, I'm just gonna go work at Starbucks or whatever is available. This you've you've screwed up, you've screwed up, you should have spent the the, the prior 10 years of your life already having a rock solid plan for career and business. You see, when I say business, some of you will think Oh, Leo, I'm not interested in business. No, you don't understand what businesses. When I talk about business, I'm not just talking about business in the conventional sense. We're talking about the entire activity of human survival. That's business. You care about business, you deeply care about business, because you care about surviving. Businesses not crunching some numbers or earning a bunch of money, businesses survival. Really what we're talking about is if we take the entire global community of humans, which is close to 8 billion people, all of them comprise sort of a social matrix. And within that matrix you need to survive. So you're not surviving in the jungle. You're surviving in this social matrix and to survive in the social matrix. You need money. The money is just a means of exchanging labor and surviving within the social matrix. And so how are you going to be getting that money, because you're gonna have to get it somehow. Because you're committed to survival. You see, you have to survive, you need food, you need electricity, you need probably some luxuries like Cable Internet and other things like this, to live the kind of life you want to lead. You see, so are you going to be surviving on your terms or on somebody else's terms, because if you're not going to be consciously figuring out your survival, by figuring out your career and your life purpose, and mastering business, then you're just going to be somebody's wage slave. That's what it's going to boil down to, that's going to be the default position. And once you become a wage slave, it's extremely difficult to break free of wage slavery. I know I've been there. I was a wage slave for about a year. I didn't like it very much. In fact, I hated it so much, I quit, I quit, I quit a promising career because I couldn't stand it, I wanted to be my own boss. And the best way to avoid or to escape wage slavery is not to enter it in the first place to plan your life out so well. So early, that you never even enter wage slavery. That's possible, but you have to, you have to go above and beyond in order to succeed in doing that. Now, of course, there's nothing wrong with a little bit of wage slavery here and there, if you need to, to, you know, to hold yourself over, that's fine. But in the long term, one of the things I suggest you might be interested in, that you might not even know that you're interested in, is escaping wage slavery, or avoiding it. And you do that by getting crystal clear about what you want out of life. And coming up with a tangible plan for your career. See, I was so clueless when I was your age, that I didn't even understand this problem of wage slavery and how much I wouldn't like it. The only way I had to learn that was by actually entering into it seeing Oh, no, this is not, this is definitely not right for me. And then I had to work really hard to break free of it. So start thinking about this stuff. Now, let's talk about different kinds of majors that you might be interested in. In university, if you have a hard major, like engineering physics. You want to become a medical doctor, whatever, the sorts of majors, they're easier, in the sense that it's more clear about what you got to do. To master these majors, then by all means, go to university for those. Now, the software majors, you can still go to university for those. In fact, like I said, you know, philosophy, it's considered one of the softer majors, actually, it's not soft at all, philosophy is one of the most serious subjects that there is, it's more serious and more important than physics. But, and that's not how most people think of it. Because most people don't really understand or do serious philosophy. But anyways, yeah, there are these kinds of softer majors that that you can major in is going to be very difficult for you to get a job directly related to that major. There's very few, for example, academic positions as a professional philosopher, there are some you can become a philosophy professor. But generally, these are plumb positions. It's quite difficult to get one of these positions, and the majority of people who become philosophy majors will never do professional academic philosophy in their life after they graduate. So what then well, you need a plan, you need a plan. And here's where I'll tell you a bit more about my personal story. Because it serves as a good example here to illustrate some of these points. So I entered university, basically, as an aerospace engineering major. I was interested in aerospace engineering, I liked the idea of, you know, the future of space, travel and, you know, sending people to Mars, I thought that that was the future, that would be cool. I thought it would be cool to work on these kinds of projects. And so, sadly, a cool major. So I went into that, and I was good academically, so I could handle that. It was pretty difficult. Courseload a lot of calculus and physics and so forth. So I spent two years doing that. But then I quickly realized, like, wait a minute, what is going to be involved with his job? I have this sort of fantasy of how what an aerospace engineer does, which could be something like, you know, traveling to Mars and so on and so on. But of course, that's not really what an aerospace engineer does. An aerospace engineer, in reality sits in a cubicle for eight hours a day for 50 years of his life. Looking at to a computer screen, you know, crunching numbers in Excel spreadsheets and CAD software. And when I thought about that, and I thought, I'm gonna be doing this for the rest of my life, this is what my entire life is going to boil down to is just sitting in a cubicle for for 50 years. Hell no, there's no way I can do that. But I already sunk two years into this, I took all the hard classes, it felt like, it was very difficult actually, psychologically and emotionally for me to admit to myself, that this major wasn't going to work for me. Because I already sunk a lot into it. And I thought that, well, maybe I can just toughed it out two more years, and then somehow make it work in the future. No, that would have been a huge mistake. So one of the most important decisions I made in my life, was to cut my losses here, admit the mistake, not try to whitewash it, or sweep it under the rug or ignore it, but to make the difficult choice to find something that I'm really passionate about. And one of the things I was always passionate about. And in fact, as as, as a youngster I thought about doing professionally was video game design. So I started to think more seriously about that. The problem with that is that it's sort of a field, that is not a traditional career path. It's not like a lot, a lawyer or a doctor, or an accountant, something like that, right? It's one of these more new modern careers. And you know, there's always new careers that are coming online, new careers are being developed by society every single decade. And usually, they're not taught at universities, not at the major ones, at least, there can be specialized schools. But in my university, there was no game design curriculum, no game design department, the closest thing would have been computer science, which was not game design. I wasn't interested in game programming. I wasn't interested in game art. I was interested in game design, specifically. So one of the problems I had here is I didn't know could I really get a job doing this, it seemed kind of like this one, the one of these kind of fanciful, you know, kid dreams, like, you know, a kid dreams about becoming an astronaut. And then when they grow up, they they realized, no, that's too hard or too unrealistic, or something like that. But I started to research game design a little bit more. And I realized, no, this, this is a legitimate field. And there can actually be good money doing this. There's a big future in it. And, and so I decided to switch, basically, to game design. But there was, of course, no game design classes in my university. So I said, Well, the other thing that I'm passionate about, as I was, at that point, late in high school, early college, I was interested in philosophy law, I had a lot of deep existential questions that I was asking about life, like, what is life? Why am I here? What is all of this? How do I become happy? How do you live the good life? Of what is knowledge? How can we know anything is true? This sorts of stuff, you know, what is religion? And I was very, very interested in these questions. And so I started to toy around with the idea of like, well, it could be game design, or I could become a like a professional philosopher. And I was kind of toying with these different possibilities. But I knew I couldn't do it all I had to make some decisions here. And the definition of making a decision is that you're making a cut between two different possibilities, and you're cutting one off, you're deciding not this one, but this one, right. So you're saying to no to something when you're making a decision. So I hatched this plan, that maybe I can go to a specialized game design University, and I looked around for those I actually found one in Seattle. That was pretty good. The problem was that it was too expensive. And there wasn't financial aid for it, my family couldn't really afford to send me there. It was also far away from home. So I would have to live and there's costs with living in a different state from where, you know, where my nearest University was near my home. So anyways, that possibility was eliminated. So I hatched this plan that I would go full in on game design, and I would teach myself game design. I would switch my major from aerospace engineering into philosophy, philosophy was a lighter course load. It was also something I was more passionate about. And I was sick of doing engineering coursework. So I really wanted to study philosophy. And at the same time, while I was studying philosophy, my plan was that I would teach myself enough game design skills by doing various projects and online tutorials and things like that. And just basically teaching myself the skills, doing modeling work on various games, and then I would be able to build a portfolio and then use that portfolio to get hired by studios after I graduated with my philosophy degree. That was the plan. And then I went to work on that plan, and actually, it worked out pretty well. I graduated half a year early. And then I use that half a year that I sort of saved by switching to philosophy. I use that to, to do some, some serious game design projects. And then from that I built my portfolio and I applied to various game studios. And I was actually lucky enough to get hired by one of the top studios in the country. And really in the world. I got hired by to Cape Austin or Irrational Games, as you might know it. The who developed Bioshock and and then they actually hired me right after BioShock was released, they hired me to work on Bioshock Infinite. And so I did pre production work on Bioshock Infinite for about a year. And then after that, you know, even though I got this amazing job, with game design, you might think so you've made it Leo, you found this great job, it's like the dream job and you finally got it, you know, it's pretty hard to break into the game industry as a designer. See, it's a lot easier to break in as a programmer or as an artist. But as a designer, it's pretty difficult to find entry level design positions. But I was able to do that. And the problem though, and I was making pretty decent money. The problem though, is I didn't like being a wage slave. I really hated it, I hated it so much that I had to then give up on that, on that idea of working for triple A studios, I didn't want to do that. So then I had to hatch a new plan to, to develop my own businesses so that I can develop the Financial Independence to stop being a wage slave and then do whatever I wanted to do have the creative autonomy to create whatever I wanted to create. And so I ended up doing that spent several years learning web development and online business did online marketing and so forth, I was able to sort of bootstrap myself that way, made some decent money. And then from there, stuff unfolded, and eventually I got into self help. And then I got into what I do now with actualized.org. And then I've been doing that now for for eight years or so. So and then also in between there i i got certified as a life coach, I went through a life coach training, I spent a lot of time learning self help, before I started actualised.org. That's when I got my life coaching, training and certification. And then I coached people, actual clients. So anyways, that's kind of my story. As you can see, I wandered around quite a bit, quite a bit, I tried various things. And I think that, that's what you got to do to really discover what you want out of life. The problem that I see for most people is that they try one thing, and then they get kind of stuck in it. And it takes a lot of inertia and emotional labor to break out of that to try something else. And so they just, they get lazy and they just get stuck in one thing. And then it's not a good fit for them. But then they just endure it for the next 4050 years of their life. And it makes them depressed, it makes them better, it makes them angry, resentful, and it robs them of all their potential. And then they also have financial difficulties. Because of course, when you present your job, you can't really work well at it, you can't generate the value and give a lot of value to the world. And therefore the world is not going to give a lot of value to you back. That's why passion is so critical. And why passion is not a luxury. Because passion is what allows you to create massive value for people. And massive value creation is how you get well financially compensated. So it is okay to wander around. And also, this this, everything I talked about here was occurring over a period of like 10 years, right. So it took a while. It's not like I just sit down and figure it all out in one go. But one thing that I was always very adamant about, no matter how much I wandered is I knew that what I wanted was to live a life on purpose, I knew that what I wanted was to be passionate about my work. And I was very proactive and deliberate in pushing myself to set up the foundation my life that I wasn't unclear about that I was crystal clear about. And that's why it worked. And that's why it doesn't work for many other people because they're not crystal clear about that. So it's not so important that you know right now exactly which major you need to go into or which career is going to be your ultimate career. What's more important is that you're committed to figuring it out. And you're working on that every single day, for months and years on end. So one key distinction that's going to help you is that realize that there's a big difference between your fantasy, your imagination of what a job is, and then the actual job itself. Like the fantasy of being an aerospace engineer, you might imagine is going to Mars and building cool rocket ships and stuff. And then the reality of being an aerospace space engineer. He's sitting in a cubicle looking at us screen for eight hours a day at Excel spreadsheets. See, night and day, night and day. So you have to make sure that the actual job that you're going to be doing is going to be something that you're satisfied with. And that the difference between your fantasy are your image of that job and the actual job is not too great. And the way you disabuse yourself of these illusions and fantasies is by actually going and doing some of this, some of this work, like maybe you want to be a writer, go try writing a short story and see how that feels. Maybe you want to be a filmmaker, go actually try to film a little indie film and see how that feels, do you actually enjoy doing that? See, because you might have this image of of a filmmaker. But that's different from actually shooting a film, you might not actually like the process of shooting a film, in which case, you gotta go find something else. So here are the top problems I have with college. First of all, is the financial cost. And going into debt, this is a huge problem, especially these days, as the costs of Africa have risen, skyrocketed so much. And they're out of control, you can easily spend 10 to $50,000 per year, times four years, you can rack up 50 To 100 to $200,000 in student debt, depending on what kind of universities you go to, of course, the more elite universities are gonna be even more expensive. So here, of course, it depends on what your financial situation is, if your parents are wealthy, and they're going to pay for everything, well, then it's, it's a little bit easier for you to decide to go to university. On the other hand, if your parents are poor, and they're not gonna be paying for anything, and you're basically going to have to have to get a bunch of loans, maybe you can get some scholarships or grants, but probably not, you're probably gonna have to incur some, some loans and debt as well. That it's a much more iffy proposition. For example, if right now, I would have to relive my life over again, and someone told me that I would have to accumulate $50,000 worth of debt. Once I graduate at age 24, let's say, in order to get my college education, I would say no, that's, that's dumb, it's not worth it, it's not worth it. Because the debt will, the debt will drive you so deep into wage slavery, you're going to be looking for any job, you're going to be desperate, like a desperate dog looking for, you know, a little bit of food, just to survive, just to pay your debts. And these debts from student loans, you can't even clear them with bankruptcy, at least not in America. Now, of course, if you're living in one of these cushy Scandinavian countries that I hear about, or in North Northern Europe, like in Germany, I hear that supposedly they give you a free college education. That's, that's pretty mind blowing. From my perspective, as an American, and that's, that's pretty amazing. So if you've got that kind of situation going for you, and I've even heard that in Scandinavian countries, they will actually pay you a stipend to go to university. So if, if you have that opportunity, well, that might be a no brainer. Because you gotta consider what's the alternative? What else are you going to do with your life. Which brings us to the second problem I have with college, and this is actually an even bigger problem than the financial problem. This is the problem of the opportunity cost. See, the four years you're gonna invest in college, that's going to be a lot of time studying, going to courses, and, you know, you're gonna be doing that basically, basically, six days a week, for the next four years. Think about what else you could do with all that time. There might be much better use of your time, especially because many of these courses and classes that you're going to be taking are going to be highly impractical, and are going to be teaching you things and skills that are never going to be used by you in your actual career. So here, here, it's really important that you think about how the actual skills and knowledge that you're gaining from the actual specific classes that you're gonna be taking, whether that's going to be knowledge and skills you're going to be using on a daily basis for the next 50 years. And if it's not, then recognize that as a giant waste of time. Now, don't get me wrong, there's something very valuable about just education in general. I'm very pro education. In fact, I'm so pro education, that my critique of university ultimately is going to come down to that it's not educational enough, not that it's too educational. There's sort of a critique of university from above and from below. My critique is from above. I've gone through the system and I've seen the problems with system. And to me actually, the education that's offered in universities, even in really good ones is low quality education. Mostly even if you go to MIT or Caltech or whatever, mostly the education you're getting there is you're getting indoctrination. You're memorizing you're cramming for tests. It's, they're not really teaching you how to think very deeply about anything. They're also not teaching you the the practical and important life skills that you need to really be successful and fulfilled in your life. There's a lot of academic mental masturbation in these universities. Now, of course, you know, if you're going to be a physics right researcher, then of course, yeah, you gotta go through that. There's a lot to learn about physics, and university will teach you physics very well, or engineering or something like that. But if that's not going to be your actual career, like, for example, I spent two years learning advanced physics and calculus. And now Now, what I do, the business that I do, even when I do computer programming, I've done quite a bit of programming through for web development. And also, as part of my game design, skill set. And, you know, I almost never used the advanced calculus, and physics, even game development, it's rarely used. So I mean, it was a giant, giant waste of time, in retrospect. So you got to really think about all of the practical and useful skills and knowledge that you could be learning versus what the university classes will be teaching you. This is a huge, huge world of difference here. I'm willing to bet that for the majority of you, what the university is going to be teaching you is not going to be something you're actually going to be using ever in your life, for the most part, and actually, sometimes they're going to teach you stuff that you can have to unlearn. For example, you might say, Well, what about English? I mean, English is something you can learn in university, and that's useful, you can use that in business and elsewhere, right? Not so much. What I actually realized after after learning four years of you know, advanced English writing essays, and so forth. In university, when I got into the business world, I noticed that all of those English skills for academia were completely useless in business, completely useless for marketing, completely useless for sales. highly impractical, very counterproductive. Very arrogant, and obnoxious and pedantic. These sort of academic English skills. I had to unlearn that, learn to speak more conversationally, more casually. Even like in my in my content, even in my recordings in my videos, I speak very casually, I don't use a lot of complex academic terminology, and so forth, even though I could I had to unlearn that took me some years to unlearn that. So in a certain sense, academia is this bubble of its own. And it is possible to sort of get fooled into thinking that the academic bubble is how it is out in the real world in the business world. And it isn't, it isn't at all. And this is one of the problems with our current university education system. So the opportunity cost is potentially enormous, you can spend the next four years of your life in some major learning some major, and then you're never going to use any of those skills or any of that knowledge ever again, once you graduate university, and this would be a huge waste of time. And also money, if you're actually paying for that if you get it for free. Okay, maybe. But it's, it's a huge, huge waste of time. If you really took your education seriously, you could learn so many skills in four years, so many practical and valuable skills. And one of the biggest problems today is we have people who are graduating as English majors, history majors, philosophy, major sociology, major psychology majors, even physics majors, whatever, even engineering majors, but then they don't go into those fields. And then also, when they get into the workplace, they realize that everything they learned had nothing to do with the actual work that we're going to be doing. Even as an engineer, many of the things they teach you in engineering school, I mean, they of course, they teach you some some basic foundations like math and physics that you're going to need no matter what, but many of the things they teach you are not actually what you're gonna be doing at your job when you're going to be doing engineering. So, a lot of kids and teens are fooled to this idea that well, I'm going to graduate university and then I'm going to have this fancy diploma and then I can you Who's that in this degree in this? All these good grades that I heard I can somehow use that to survive in the business world? Because he once you leave the university academia bubble, then you're in the business world. So don't tell me that all ugly, I'm not interested in business. No, you're very interested in business, because you're going to be in business for the rest of your life. Once you're out of university in academia, and even University academia is its business. It's one of the business biggest businesses there is. Its we'll talk about that in a second. It's basically a pyramid scheme. More than a second. But let me finish this point that I was on. So. So yeah, you need skills that actually work in business, you need tangible marketable skills actually offer value to your employers, and to your clients and customers. Not just theoretical, know how, or knowledge. And so the illusion is that you think you're gonna go to university, you're going to work really hard to get these good grades for four years. And then after that, you think, Okay, I've made it now I have all these valuable skills, right? No, you're at Ground Zero, you spent four years running like a hamster in a wheel getting nowhere. So be careful with that trap. Now, let me talk about academia as a pyramid scheme. Really, really, our education system right now, today is still the Dark Ages. The education system is very corrupt. It's very cut and dry. It's very much indoctrination, just pure memorization. Even in great universities, this is true. Sometimes you'll encounter the exceptional professor, or the exceptional class. But for the most part, most classes are just paint by numbers, indoctrination. And academia is a pyramid scheme. So you understand why is because the reason they charge you, you know, 10s of 1000s of dollars, hundreds of 1000s of dollars of all the students on the bottom of the pyramid, they need a constant churning of new students coming in spending their daddies and mommies money. funneling that money up the pyramid, then these universities, you know, they have giant bloated budgets and so forth. And then they pay all their professors fairly well, and the professors get these tenured positions. But then to be within this university pyramid scheme, there are only a few positions at the top. So the amount of people who can actually become professors who work at these top universities is extremely small, these positions are extremely competitive, it's virtually impossible to get them, you have to be the cream of the crop to get these positions, and people are fighting over it, and the majority people will not get them. But there's some sort of an illusion that it could happen. And the whole academic system is basically geared towards creating academics, but the majority of people going to university will never be academics or scholars, probably less than 1% of them will be. And it's very difficult to succeed as an academic or a scholar outside of academia, they don't basically teach you those skills, they don't teach you the business skills, you need to succeed in that not the marketing skills or not the sales skills. And so basically, once you've got this sort of academic degree, like a philosophy degree, what are you gonna do with it? I mean, you could try to become a professional philosopher, but that's gonna be very difficult for you to do. There's not enough positions. And so in a sense, is a pyramid scheme. That depends upon new fresh minds getting pumped into this meat grinder every single year. That's what these universities run on, while they proclaim to be these bastions of truth and wisdom and knowledge. Actually, the reality with universities is that mostly the whole university system is geared towards stupid people. It's factory farming, education, factory farmed education, the way that we factory farm cattle is the same way that we educate people in universities. There there's not a lot of consciousness or wisdom in the education system. Now, we have to be careful here, because there are some serious benefits to university education. I'm not just trashing the whole thing. There is value in just general education. General Education rounds you out as a as a human being. It gives you a sort of a breadth of of knowledge about history, about art, about science about math just that is important. Because otherwise what we have is we have a population of morons and these morons will then not be very good citizens and lead to all sorts of catastrophe catastrophes. Social and Political. For example, look at what's going on right now in our political situation in America, and also in many parts of the of the world. Nationalism is on the rise. Fascism is on the rise. authoritarianism is on the rise, conspiracy theories are on the rise. All of this is directly related to lack of education. Look at who votes for example, for Donald Trump, the people who vote for Donald Trump, one of the most clearest distinguishing features of those who do and those who don't vote for Donald Trump is that those who do, by and large, don't have a college education. And that's why they get suckered into the kind of nationalistic ideologies that this con man is, is peddling. Because when you go to college, at least what the college will teach you, if you're going to good college, they will teach you how to evaluate your sources, how to distinguish which sources are high quality, which are low quality sources, they will set standards and norms for you intellectually, they will, they will instill in you a sense of intellectual honesty and integrity. They will steer you away from radical ideologies and conspiracy theories, because this doesn't pass academic muster, you see. And that's very, very valuable. Otherwise, what we get is we got a population of morons and half the population even more, basically doesn't have a college degree, college education. So they don't have any of these kinds of standards, they become very easily susceptible to all sorts of propaganda, conspiracy theories, cults, ideologies, that become very, very toxic, and ultimately can lead to things like you know, authoritarianism, Fascism, Nazism, and so forth. Serious stuff, serious stuff. So I am very pro education. Again, like I said, my critique of the university system is that it's actually not enough of the right kind of education. For example, the most important things that a human needs to know the practical skills, the kind of stuff that I teach with my channel with actualize that org, the self help skills, the psychology skills, this the deep existential understanding of reality, practical life skills. These are not taught in university at all. I mean, it's, it's just absurd. It's completely absurd and backwards. Really, what I'm teaching here is rule through my work, through actualize that org is what university education should be about. But of course, it's not about that at all. And it can't be because it would be too big of a political powderkeg. Because the stuff that I teach, actually, will seriously transform your whole life and society. But that's exactly what a pyramid scheme doesn't want, is to be deeply transformed. And revolutionized, right. So there's vested interests, that keep this corruption in place. And another problem with with university that I was actually shocked to discover is that even if you select the major that you're interested in, like I selected philosophy, but actually, I couldn't. And I wasn't allowed to study the stuff that I really love within philosophy. I had to study philosophy that was, according to their strict little schedule. Like if you want to graduate in four years, you have to take classes on a very strict schedule. And a lot of times what would happen is that there were like, there was a philosophy class that I really wanted to take. But I couldn't take it because it's time slot conflicted with another philosophy class that I had to take, because it was like a formal requirement of getting the degree. So I had to take this one, which I wasn't interested in. But the one I was interested in, I couldn't take because the time slot was a conflicted. And this happened to me numerous times. So I was actually very disappointed with with academic philosophy, because the most interesting aspects I had to learn myself just off on my own, and in a sense, university was taking time away and all the homework assignments and all the all the readings and all the tests and essays that I had to write all of that was taking time away from me just studying philosophy. It's actually much better to study philosophy off on your own than it is through some sort of formal university system. See, the reason I say that colleges is designed for dumb people. It's designed for people who are not capable of disciplining themselves and educating themselves. So they go into this mechanical meat grinder process. This process is just a set of steps of paint by numbers that You go through these steps, you go through these classes, you do these things, and then supposedly you're educated. And now, they give you a certificate. But I mean, that's so stupid, because all the subjects have so much depth and nuance to them, your certificate says nothing about how much you really understand about your subject. See, just because you have a philosophy degree doesn't really mean you understand philosophy, even if you have a philosophy PhD, that doesn't mean you understand anything about philosophy, I can run circles around a philosophy PhD professor, cuz I've studied philosophy so deeply on my own, but I don't have a PhD. So most would consider me like a bad philosopher, because I don't have a PhD. But actually, in the actual substance of understanding, my understanding is way deeper than any academic philosopher, or any physicist, or any psychology, like my understanding of human psychology, is an order of magnitude deeper than any academic psychologist or therapist. In a university, why is that precisely because the university doesn't allow you for the really deep understanding, they allow you, or what they do is they sort of, they funnel you into a very standard way of thinking about your field. And that can be very limiting. If you're someone who's ambitious, like me, and really wants a lot out of life. So you have to figure out how ambitious Are you? How self driven, are you? How motivated are you? How willing are you and able are you to discipline yourself? Because if you are good at all those things, then maybe you don't need university. University is mostly for sheep. Not for independent, highly creative thinkers. It's like a religion. You see, for a lot of people, what they need is they just need a standard meat grinder system that they go through. Like with religion. Religion works for a lot of people precisely because it involves no thinking. Most religious people are not interested in asking deep metaphysical questions and epistemic questions about the nature of self, and life, and reality, and death. And these sorts of things are not interested in contemplating this stuff at all. What they want is they just want to be told when to arrive, who to listen to, and what to believe. So it goes like this, someone tells them, okay, show up on Sunday, from 9am, to 1pm. Listen to this guy standing at the pulpit, he will tell you everything about life, and everything about death and the afterlife, and how to live the good life and what you need to do. And you need to follow these 10 Rules these commandments. And as long as you follow those, and you say 10, Hail Marys, and you come and you confess your sins, you know, once in a while, then you're good, you're gonna have the good life. See, for many people, that's extremely appealing, because they're just sheep, they just want to go through this mechanical process. They're not interested in actually getting dirty with life and trying to figure it out for themselves. And this is true for many people who join institutions, groups and organizations. It can be companies, corporations, nonprofits, political parties, and universities. There is an appeal to that kind of highly institutionalized bureaucratic mechanical system, you don't need to think very deeply, you're not constantly confused. You don't need to worry about disciplining yourself, because they tell you when to show up and what you need to do. If you had to do that all on your own, if you had to figure out how to educate yourself all on your own, that would be a serious challenge. But also, it might come with a serious reward or benefit that you couldn't get any other way. One of the illusions that universities sort of fools you into because it's convenient for their pyramid scheme, is this idea that your your credentials, or your degree is worth anything. Or that your grades matter. They don't. Your degree means nothing. Literally nothing. It doesn't matter what your degree is, doesn't matter what your major is, doesn't matter what your grades is, none of that matters. What matters is how much value are you able to offer the world? How creative Are you able to be? How much are you able to help fellow human beings in ways that they need? If you can do that, then you'll have an easy time surviving in the world. And if you can't, no matter how many degrees you have and majors and what major you are or what grades you get, that doesn't matter. Never in my life has somebody asked me, Hey, what were your grades like, back in university? Never, never not one of my employers, not one of my clients, they don't care. And for that matter, nobody ever has asked me for my degree or for a certificate on anything. It doesn't matter. Of course, some of course, I get hundreds of 1000s of YouTube comments over the years. So reading all those, of course, some people do ask me sometimes, but But generally, like, no serious person asks me for my degree, on anything. Because the value I offer the world does not depend on any degrees or certificates. All that's bullshit. That's just human bullshit. What it depends upon is, Can I offer you some insights, some wisdom, some techniques, some ideas and concepts that will be helpful to you and you for yourself will clearly see that they're helpful, or they're not. And if they're helpful to you, you'll want to do business with me. And if they're not, you'll go away. And that's generally how the business world works. People don't care about what your qualifications are, what they care about is what you can do for them. So like, as a computer programmer, to be an amazing computer programmer, you don't need a college degree. In fact, if you spend four years by yourself, just learning computer programming, I can almost promise you, you'll be a better computer programmer than if you spend four years in computer science as a computer science major. The real skills are mostly learned outside of university, off by yourself on your own working on your own projects. So that's the reality of it. Now, is there you might say, well, Leo, the way you're portraying this then University sounds terrible. No, it's not terrible. There are benefits to university. So first of all, getting a general education, a well rounded education that is important. And honestly, most people don't know how to educate themselves. So if the option is between you not educating yourself at all, and just, you know, going to work at Starbucks, versus getting four years of a decent university education. I would much rather you get this. Because if you just go work at Starbucks after high school, you're gonna be an idiot for the rest of your life. Probably. Read much rather you have this. But, but you could have so much more than this. See, there's there's so much more here. The question is, how much are you really willing to invest here? Are you really willing to go above and beyond what everybody else is doing, and just being a sheep herded through this meat grinder system. If you are, then I've got some amazing ideas for you here in a minute. Let me finish though, with the benefits of college. So it's an easy way to educate yourself. It's, it's also very good for socialization, actually. And that's one of the things that I one of the biggest mistakes probably, that I made in my life is that I focused so much on career development, for the first 25 years of my life, that I didn't put any of my skill points, so to speak, into socialization relationships, and I was very deficient in that department, with dating and so forth. Basically, I was so focused on building this foundation for my life that I didn't leave any room for, for dating when I was in high school and in college. And in retrospect, this was a mistake, because those were the perfect times to develop socialization skills, dating skills, experience with sexuality, and so forth. Because it's much more difficult to develop these things later, after you graduate university. So you're going to be missing a lot of opportunities there. But also, I should warn you, though, that a lot of people make the opposite mistake of what I made. I swung my pendulum too much into the sort of career direction. Most people though, I see them swing in the opposite direction of they get so lost in relationships and in dating and sexuality. When they're at this age, they go, you know, to frat parties getting drunk and having sex and all this and then falling in love into these into these kind of shallow, frivolous and fatuous infatuated sort of relationships. That lasts for months or maybe for a year then they end and it's just a string of broken relationships. And it just this sort of sort of young foolish love, that ends up wasting a lot of your emotional energy because you know, these relationships once you fall in love in these relationships, you know, they can be so emotionally draining that it is going to, it's going to take all of your focus away from your career, building this foundation for yourself, actualizing yourself developing yourself. All the stuff that I talked about that you know, forget it, you can, you can easily lose years and years of your life, the prime of your life, this critical phase of your life, to these sorts of stupid, you know, sexual escapades, you have to be careful, you have to kind of balance it out, find a healthy middle ground there. So yeah, college is good for that. And again, if if you're very clear about you know, becoming an engineer or a doctor, then yeah, college is great for that, too. But other than that, I don't have much, much positive to say about college. Other than that, it's better than working at Starbucks. I mean, you have to consider alternatives. Like if you don't go to college. This is one of the biggest fears I have in giving this advice to people is that if I tell people that node college sucks, and then they just say, Okay, well, fine, and then they do nothing, and then they just end up going to Starbucks. Well, in that case, I would have rather shot a video telling you how great colleges, because that would have served you better. My point in criticizing college is to show you a higher path. So let's talk about that a little bit here. What is the higher path? What is the alternative to college, the alternative to college is a serious commitment to self education. Take all that time, and money and energy and focus and emotional labor, and channel it all into the most important skills that you will need to survive and to succeed in life. And all the things you're most passionate interested about? Create your own curriculum, what do you want to study, don't ask somebody else to tell you what that is. In this way, your self education can be far superior to college, you can learn a lot more a lot faster. Because what you'll be learning is the stuff you really love. When you're studying what you really love, you learn it very fast, you've heard it very deep. And also, it'll be a lot more practical. Because the way I recommend you learn is not by reading textbooks, but by actually doing projects. And this is how I basically taught myself most of the skills that are most important in my life that I have used to create a lot of success, you know, I've created millions of dollars worth of success for myself. And I'm still only in my mid 30s. So I have been successful using these techniques. I'm not just you know, sitting up here talking to us as some sort of poor person who's barely scraping by, I've been, I've been running my own businesses for 10 years now. I've been financially fully financially independent, free of wage slavery for 10 years, doing great for myself financially, you know, able to buy myself a house, a car, everything zero debt, no financial difficulties, how was I able to do that by building really powerful skills, very marketable, valuable skills. Mostly through doing my own projects, I would have an idea of what I want to work on cradle project for it work on it. For example, the way I became a game designer and got hired by one of the best studios in the world to work on Triple A games. That's not easy to accomplish. How did I accomplish that? I spent seven months developing a mod. Actually I developed a mod for Oblivion is one of the most popular mods called loss buyers. Maybe you played it for Oblivion, spent seven months developing that full time, full time, I learned so much about game development, developing that mod. I made a lot of mistakes, but also learned when you're developing your own projects, you learn skills much, much better. I also taught myself web development, I'm pretty good at Front End Web Development. I also know how to do some back end web development. I'm fluent in HTML. CSS, I'm really good with CSS. I know some PHP. I do. I did a lot of graphic design, front end graphic design for websites created a lot of different websites that I didn't really publish but just kind of for myself. And I was doing that all throughout my teenage years, I was just kind of interested in web development by working on these projects. And I learned web development much better than I could learn it if I went to university for that. So the way that you educate yourself very deeply is that you work with these projects, you try different projects, these projects can be something that ranges from a month to complete two months to complete, sometimes six months to complete. Don't work on projects that take too long, because one of the biggest mistakes you can make is you can come up with a project that's so gargantuan and so ambitious, it'll take you five years to complete it and then you never will. So keep your project small also by tinkering around with stuff like if you want to be an engineer, one of the best ways to learn to be an engineer is just start tinkering with whatever you want to do. You know, if you're interested in robotics, start tinkering with little robotics. You can go by like a little robotic set online or at the store and start tinkering with that and then start machining your own little robotic parts and so forth. You know, buy motors and buy wires and buy solar panels and hook them up together. And then, you know, try to create something. This is much more valuable actually, than just what you're going to be learning at university. Also, through freelancing, you can do freelancing work. Like if you want to learn to be a computer programmer, a web designer, whatever, a writer, you can take small, low paying freelance gigs. And these freelance gigs. What's so great about them is because you're gonna be interacting with a boss, somebody who's hiring you, a client, this claim is going to have real world demands upon you real business demands, not just some academic bullshit, but real business demands. And if you're able to meet those demands, that shows you what you need to be successful in the world, how to survive, how to earn a decent paycheck, and then you can take those skills and you can keep amping them up, and then keep raising your rates. And slowly, you can do better and better freelancing. And then you can parlay that off into an actual job, full time career for you know, for some employer, and then you can use your freelancing gigs as a, you know, as a nice resume piece to show your employers that you know what you're doing. Likewise, with these projects that you build, one of the reasons these projects are so amazing is you can document these projects. And you can create a portfolio of these projects. And one of the best ways to get hired is not with a degree. But with an amazing portfolio. If you want to get hired as an artist, as a computer programmer, as a web designer, as a filmmaker, as a video editor, as a producer, as a whatever, have a few projects make the very, very small but polished, and present them to prospective employers and they will want to scoop you up. Nothing impresses an employer more than a well polished project, you don't, you don't even need a bunch of projects, really one solid well polished project in any field that you want to work in, will be enough to land you a great job. So this is a hands on project based education. And when you're trying to accomplish these projects, of course, it's difficult. A lot of times you you stumble and you you run into technical challenges, trying to create these projects. But that's how you learn the most, not by reading stuff in a textbook or listening to Professor by actually trying to do it, and failing and failing and failing and failing. And then but pushing yourself to succeed no matter what, despite all the failure. And through that you will learn you will find the books, the tutorials, the mentors, and so forth that are necessary. Speaking of which, there's amazing, just utterly amazing untapped potential for self education. Now through the internet. You can easily buy cheap books on any subject that you want to learn about easily on Amazon used books for for pennies and dollars, you can find them easy, easy, easy, why pay universities, ridiculous amounts for you know, hundreds of dollars for textbooks 1000s of dollars for textbooks, when you can buy better books on Amazon, much cheaper. This is part of the university grift and the pyramid scheme. They upsell you on these ridiculous textbooks. That don't even teach you the best skills. I mean, if you were paying $200 for a textbook that taught you best skills, okay, I can justify that. But, but it doesn't. That's the problem with there's much better ways to learn. Right now on the internet, you can find online courses, tutorials, videos, workshops, seminars, training programs, conferences, on almost any subject, you want to learn, you want to learn business, you want to learn marketing, you want to learn sales, you want to learn psychology, you wanted to learn life coaching, you want to learn art, you want to learn 3d modeling, you want to learn programming, you want to learn engineering, whatever it is, you can find courses for it online. A lot of times for free, sometimes for for money, sometimes you'll have to pay $200 $500 $1,000 for a course. And you might say well $1,000 for a course that's a lot. That's that sounds like a ripoff. No, it's not. Actually it's a much better value than what you're paying in a university. You're so overpaying in a university, precisely because it's a captive system. Once you're in the university, they expect you to buy all their books and take all their programs and all their courses. And for that you're paying 10s and even hundreds of 1000s of dollars. Investing in your own education is one of the best investments you can make. It's such a good investment that I would I would give you this advice. Don't even worry about how much it costs to buy a book or an online course or a video or a workshop or a seminar. All of this stuff will pay for itself many many times over over the course of your life. A seminar or workshop a well selected one will teach you so much more than any single college class could. There are a lot of very specialized amazing training programs available. You can find training programs about art, illustration, you know, design, media, marketing, sales, almost anything, go search for them. Sometimes they cost 1000s of dollars, don't be cheap, be willing to pay that. Appreciate the value that these training programs are giving you. Conferences, go to conferences and meet people who are interested in the things that you're interested in. For example, one of the one of the most important things I did when I was trying to become a game designer, is I went to the Game Developers Conference held in San Francisco every March. I remember I went when I was like 23 years old, I was really young. It was actually my first time that I ever flew somewhere outside of like my home city, without my parents. So this guy, I convinced them to buy me a ticket, I said, you know, I need this, I need to go to this conference, because maybe I can make some connections and get a job. So my parents agreed. So they bought me a ticket. And I flew out there and got a hotel cheap hotel, stayed in San Francisco for a week, made some important connections, spoke with other designers and developers at this conference. And I actually there was like a employers booth there is like section with with employer booths, I went to these booths, I got business cards from all the you know, the people who are all the studios that were looking to hire designers. And then from from that alone, I almost landed a game design job from that alone. Because the connections that I made, I learned a lot about the industry through that. So whatever profession, you're going to be a part of make sure you go to the conferences, it's worth it, sometimes the conferences can cost $1,000 or more. And then you have to add on top of that, you know, hotels and airfare, it's worth it, it's worth it. Because you can make important connections, find employers, find mentors. And, and that's a powerful way to learn too is through a mentor, try to find yourself a mentor, find people who are already successful in the field that you want to be successful in and then see if you can, if they're willing to mentor you, if there's some, you know, low level work that you can do for them. And then in return, they they share their wisdom and insights and experience with you. That's a very powerful method. Another method for self education is modeling. And modeling is sort of an NLP concept. Actually, what it means is probably not what you think modeling means you find some role model of a professional or somebody who you respect, who's doing what you want to do, who has a certain skill set that you want. And then what you do is you carefully you talk to them, you interview them, and then you you break down exactly what it is that that they do to be successful at what they do. So maybe you find like, a really successful business person that you admire. And then you do an interview with them. And then you ask them specific. Okay, so how did you become so good at business? Like, what kind of books do you read? And then how much time do you spend like in the morning on the internet? And how much time do you spend on email? And how much time do you spend, you know, doing conference calls? And how much time do you spend reading books? And how much time do you spend actually, with your employees and, and you break all this down and then you try to actually replicate that in your own life. And then by doing that, you can replicate their their results. So there are enormous opportunities for self education. The the biggest caveat I have to give here, though, is that warning. It's easy to fool yourself that you're going to educate yourself, but then actually be lazy and not do it. So the self education approach is really only suitable for those who are very ambitious, very driven, very passionate, and are willing to discipline themselves. It is hard to discipline yourself. You University helps you with that. Because it gives you a specific schedule, you just go to the classes at the right times. And then the rest is sort of easy. But nobody's going to give you a schedule. When you're self educating. Nobody's going to tell you how many pages you should read per day. Nobody's going to tell you which books to read, which courses to take. You can easily just slack off and watch TV or play video games or smoke weed or go have sex or go jerk off or whatever. You can you can do that in place of self education, and waste a lot of time. And if that's going to be you, then I'd rather have you go go to a university, where at least they will give you some discipline and structure. So you see, it all very much depends upon you. Only you can decide what the right choices are in your life. Do not make the mistake of outsourcing the executive decision making for your life. Don't ask anybody to tell you what your major should be. Don't ask anybody's opinion about what your major should be. Not your parents, not your friends, it doesn't matter. Only you can know what your major should be. And don't ask others to tell you whether you should go to university or not, or whether you shouldn't become a business person or not. Or whether you should learn a specific skill set like should I learn computer programming or not. You have to decide that depending upon where you see your life going. So you need to have a vision of where you're going to go. All of the most important skills that I developed to lead to my success today have come from independent self education, from reading from books, from tutorials from projects, These skills include web development, game development, programming, philosophy, psychology, self help and personal development, dating and relationships and sexuality, online marketing, sales, business, nutrition, health and fitness, socialization. Increasing my self esteem and confidence, public speaking. And of course, the spiritual topics that I talk about. These are in a sense, some of the most important skills you can learn. And speaking of which, here are a list of skills that you should be laser focused on for the next five or 10 years of your life developing proficiency and expertise with the following skills. Because these are the skills that are the foundation that everybody needs to really create a fulfilling life for themselves. And these will not be taught to you for the most part in university. That's the worst part. You have to take responsibility for building these yourself. So business sales and marketing. These are hugely important. Even if you think that you don't like business, sales and marketing. I don't care if you're an artist. I'm a very artistic creative person. Personally, I don't like business. I don't like sales. I don't like marketing. I hate marketing. I hated marketing with a vengeance. I forced myself to learn it, because I knew I had to in order to escape wage slavery. And so I did. Only thanks to that, was it possible. If you don't understand business, sales and marketing, you're gonna be struggling financially for the rest of your life, you're going to be financially clueless, and dependent on others for the rest of your life, basically. Next is self help and personal development. Go to a bookstore. Ask for the self help aisle, every book and every topic covered in that self help aisle is full of the most valuable information that you could possibly learn in your life. All of that will transform your life. And if you want a really good list of specific books, I have a list of self help books that I review, over 200 there, these books will transform your whole life go check it out on my website, university does not teach self help topics at all. It's an embarrassment. It's just a complete travesty. This is one of the most important fields. Don't let others poopoo Self Help for you and tell you that it's a bad field full of pseudoscience and an airy fairy nonsense, nothing can be further from the truth. The Self Help field is one of the most practical fields, which is why it's one of the most successful fields. More self help books are sold than probably any other books. Year over year over year. It's not a fad. The reason it is this way, it's a multibillion dollar industry. The reason it is this way is because it's so useful to people. The next skill set is Psychology. You need a deep understanding of human psychology and your own psychology. Not in an academic sense, but in a practical sense, what I teach through actualize that org emotional mastery is another skill set. Learning about your emotions. That's also something I teach through my videos. But you can find books on that as well. Mastering your emotions, then of course dating relationships and sexuality. There's a lot to learn there and they're not going to teach that to you and university for sure. language is important learning proper and good writing and speaking skills. And what they teach you in university is not at all adequate for the kind of writing and speaking skills you need. In the business environment. History is important to learn. I think there are a lot of deep lessons from history. And actually history is one of the things that university excels at teaching. But you can also learn history just as well by yourself, not within a university, you don't need to pay 10s of 1000s of dollars to learn history, you can find online courses and so forth to do that. The next set of skills is spirituality, philosophy, epistemology and existential questions about reality. You might think that spirituality is some sort of airy fairy thing. And it's not important, because it's not tangible. Nothing can be further from the truth. You basically, it's impossible basically, to have a fulfilling life without a spiritual connection. Your rationality is not going to carry you, I don't care if you're a scientist, if you're a nerd, if you're a computer programmer, you're not going to have a sixth truly successful what I consider a successful life without delving into spirituality, and philosophical and epistemic topics and existential topics, topics that have to do with life and death. With what is the nature of reality, this is also something, I covered a lot of depth here and actualize that org. And then lastly, awareness, consciousness and mindfulness, these skills. And educating yourself about what awareness is and how it works, and what consciousness is and how it works and developing mindfulness skills, meditation skills, absolutely a game changer, crucial, absolutely crucial. And it's a travesty that none of this is taught in universities at all. Truly, We are in the dark ages. So now, the decision is up to you do you want to go to university or not? Again, it very much depends on your priorities and who you are, I can't tell you what to do. I've shown you the pros and cons of some of the various traps that are here. One last bit of advice I want to give you is that if you're thinking of going the sort of self education, Route, be careful, don't fool yourself, self education is difficult, you're gonna have to work harder to self educate yourself, then by just going to university, it'll be harder. But also the payoffs will be greater. And if you're going to go down that road, then here's some advice for how to convince your parents of this. See, because your parents probably want you to go to university. And they meant they may not trust you. For example, with your self education approach, they also might not trust you, with a certain soft major, like maybe you want to become a philosophy major or sociology major, they might not trust you with this, they might want you sort of like the classic Indian family, you know, they might want you to become a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer or something like that. So what do you do in this case? Well, first of all, you're 18 years old, maybe you're 20 years old, at this age that you're at, you're basically a grown adult, you have to start acting like that. You have to stand up for your own passions and your own values. So sometimes your parents will give you bad advice. One of the worst piece of advice your parents can tell you is to become an accountant. When you hate accounting, or have no passion for accounting. It's one of the worst pieces of advice. So one of the ways to help get your parents on your side is to show them that even if you're going to choose a major like philosophy, or like sociology or whatever, that you have a tangible plan for your survival, because that's what your parents are really concerned about. See, even more so than you being educated, they just want you to survive, which is why a lot of these Indian families will want you to become a doctor or a lawyer because they know that if you're going to be a lawyer, you're going to survive without much difficulty. But if you become a philosopher or an artist, or a filmmaker or a game designer, then they think that you're probably gonna be starving and asking them for money. So you can assuage some of those fears, by coming to your parents with a practical plan of how you're going to be developing your most essential and important survival skills, separate from your university education, whether you go to university or don't I still recommend the self education approach. Even if you go to university. That's not enough. That's not enough to succeed in life. Even if you go to university, you're going to still have to be developing most of these important skills by yourself. Nobody is going to teach you self help, or meditation or spirituality or Business and Marketing skills at university. And these are crucial skills that you're going to need, and they're going to pay dividends for you for the rest of your life. So for example, one of the things that I did when I switched to philosophy is I told my parents that yes, I'm switching to philosophy, but don't worry, because I'm going to be seriously developing practical skills in game development and other things that are gonna I'm going to be building a portfolio, I'm going to be building, you know, my resume and developing these tangible skills, programming skills, web developer skills, all these skills that I'm going to use to get a job. So don't worry that I'm taking philosophy. That helps. And then, of course, more than just talking about you got to demonstrate it, your parents have to see that you're serious about it, and that you're doing it every single day. It's not enough just to say it, and then go play video games all day, or smoke weed, or, you know, hanging out with your friends all day. You got to actually be serious. Now's the time to be serious, you're an adult, start acting like it. If you want your parents and others around you to treat you like an adult, if you want to be able to drive a car and to buy booze and buy weed and this sorts of stuff. And you want people to take you seriously start acting seriously. See, the problem is you want people to treat you like an adult. But then you still behave like a child. It's time to get serious. It's time to take the growing up process seriously started to take life seriously, time to start taking life seriously, time to start taking your own development Seriously. Stop. Stop, just expecting others to grow you. That's what was happening through the first 12 years of your education through elementary school, middle school and high school. Basically, the adults in charge, were trying to serve you for your own benefit, to teach you things that they thought you might need later in your life. That's what was happening throughout the first 12 years of school. And you just went along with their plan. The whole beauty of education is to finally break free of all the stuff that you were told you had to learn. And now start to learn the stuff that you really care about. And do that for the rest of your life. Education does not end after university education only begins after university. And it continues for the rest of your life. And then you can use me as a resource to help with that. Because the whole point of my channel and actualized. org is to is to teach you for the rest of your life to give you insights, the most powerful and practical insights that you need to transform your life. So as we're wrapping up here, I want to give you four, four key key lessons specifically for you, youngsters, and those in the college range that you need to remember. So first lesson is clarity, clarity, clarity, clarity. Keep clarifying what you want out of life, what your passions are, who you are. Secondly, tailor your life to who you are your unique strengths and passions. Don't want a life that everybody else has want a life that only you can have a unique life, a life that's custom fit for you that fits you like a glove. That's what all of your Executive Decision Making should be geared towards right now. The third point is lifelong learning, commit to lifelong learning and start doing it from today onwards. Do it every single day, that least one hour a day. Maybe two hours, maybe four hours. And if you're doing this in lieu of university, then six hours, eight hours a day. And the fourth key is be proactive about this whole process. Don't just sit back and think that things will just work out. Things will not automatically work out. Success will not come to you automatically. A job will not come to you automatically. A great career will not come to you automatically a life purpose will not come to you automatically. All of this requires serious effort, discipline and determination and commitment on your part. You have to be out there hunting for it like a pig hunting for truffles. That's the only way you're gonna find a truffle It's not just gonna magically somehow just land on your dinner plate. All right now, I want to recommend a couple of my videos, that will be very helpful for you to watch after watching this, if you've got value out of this one. First, I have a two part series called life advice for young people parts one, part two, check that out, that's perfect for you. Also, I have one related to this, which is called life advice for high school and college students go check that one out. I have another one called How to Escape wage slavery, go check that one out. And then of course, I have hundreds more that are also going to be very valuable for you. And I have the life purpose course. It's a paid course it costs some money, but given what you're going to pay for it, and the value that it would give. And the clarity would give you in your life. The life purpose course is all about clarity is 25 hours of helping to clarify what you want out of your life. And then how to construct a plan to get it. It's very practical, has lots of exercises and techniques, gives you resources and books. And it I mean, this is the complete package, you couldn't have asked for a better course, if you're unclear about the trajectory of your life, this, this course will change your whole life. So consider investing in that if you want. Alright, that's it, I'm done here. Good luck with your decisions. Good luck with whether you go to college or don't go to college. I hope that regardless of your choice, you choose to invest seriously in your life. Invest seriously in your self education. And you don't confuse, don't confuse now. Education in the university system with serious self education, these are two totally different things. All right, you're only going to get from life, what you put into it. And remember that institutions and bureaucracies are designed for the lowest common denominator, they are not designed for the most ambitious, and self actualizing humans, because we're too rare. Most people are happy being cheap. If you want to rise above being a sheep, then you're gonna have to invent your own methods, you're not going to find ready made solutions, you're gonna have to invent them yourself. But that's also what makes life so interesting and exciting is inventing those methods. All right. That's it here. Please remember to click that like button for me and come check out actualize that org There, you will find the extra resources, you will find my book list, which is a great way to begin your self education. In fact, with my bullets, I guarantee you this, if you read the over 200 books on my book list over the next five or 10 years, just that information alone will completely transform your life, and will be 10 times more valuable than anything you could learn in university, I promise you that. But here's the caveat, you have to read all those books. And then you have to actually apply everything in the books, you have to apply it, it's not enough just to read it and apply it. So check that out my life purpose courses there, you can find that as well. You can find my blog where I post exclusive content, you can find the forum where you can chat with others who are struggling through similar issues like you. And the last thing I'll say is that if you are looking to build an amazing life, you have hit upon the mother lode right here with actualized. Org, you're not going to find a more transformative, comprehensive and deep set of teachings anywhere online, then what I'm offering, of course, take that with a grain of salt, I am self biased here. It serves my interest to say so but I think my content is pretty good. It's pretty deep. It's pretty broad. I think that if you can't build a good life from the stuff that I'm talking about, then something's wrong. Something's wrong with your head. It's all right here for you. And if you don't get it from me Of course I also I don't just monopolize My Teachings. Of course I also refer you to other experts and other teachers out there I recommend many different great teachers and thinkers and experts and enlightened masters and meditation teachers and business leaders and whatever you know role models so my approach is very multi perspectival I'm not just teaching you someone ideology actualize. org is not an ideology, really. It's a it's a meta survey of 1000s of different teachings and teachers and picking the best parts from all of them. See, I don't discriminate. I don't just study Western stuff. I started I study Eastern stuff. I study sermonic stuff. I study spiritual stuff. I study New Age stuff. I study hard scientific stuff, all of it. Because what I'm looking for is the best of all of it. I'm not loyal to Any one field or any one technique, or any one method or any one school or any one ideology, and I recommend that you also adopt this multi perspectival meta approach in your self education and you'll be amazed at how far you can get with that.