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  • What Youll Wish Youd Known

    This is one of my favorite essays. I read it a while back and I'm glad I finally came across it again. Definately worth reading for anyone graduating from anything...even if it's just graduating to a new day of doing the same old thing that you hate - perhaps this essay will give you... more

    Reviewed by Teeg Aug 04 2005, 04:39pm ( 94 reviews ) paulgraham.com

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  • Rated by arthurnw on Aug 16, 5:07pm

    A bit long-winded, but good stuff. Not everyone needs to be "pre-_____".
  • Rated by RukasuFox on Jun 18, 11:40pm

    Some good advice and points to reflect on; a little long but I'm sure you'd find something interesting in here.
  • Rated by Vonilan on Jun 01, 11:52am

    For once, a speech targeted at high schoolers that actually provides some legitimate advice that, if followed, will most likely make the reader a better person.
  • Rated by zestycoyote on Jun 01, 7:23am

    Wall of text. Boo.
  • Rated by shannonrene on May 26, 2:17pm

    Hello - darn right I wish I'da known this before I left HS. Not sure whether I'da listened but would have been easier to recognize the crap when it happened. Every highschooler/college student should take the time to read this.
  • Rated by FlamingEffigy on May 20, 2:16pm

    tl;dr. sounds stupid, but it really is.
  • Rated by alaingabriel on Mar 28 2009, 12:57pm

    "Look for smart people and hard problems. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you can find such a clump, it's probably worthwhile to join it. But it's not straightforward to find these, because there is a lot of faking going on. To a newly arrived undergraduate, all university departments look much the same. The professors all seem forbiddingly intellectual and publish papers unintelligible to outsiders. But while in some fields the papers are unintelligible because they're full of hard ideas, in others they're deliberately written in an obscure way to seem as if they're saying something important. This may seem a scandalous proposition, but it has been experimentally verified, in the famous Social Text affair. Suspecting that the papers published by literary theorists were often just intellectual-sounding nonsense, a physicist deliberately wrote a paper full of intellectual-sounding nonsense, and submitted it to a literary theory journal, which published it."
  • Reviewed by roswellpixie on Feb 17 2009, 5:21pm

    tldr. I'm joking.
  • Rated by amacleod03 on Feb 11 2009, 11:53am

    Very nice. I wish I had come across this when my son was in highschool, it would really have helped.
  • Reviewed by electrifried on Feb 06 2009, 6:16am

    From the page: "When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they nearly all say the same thing: that they wasted so much time. If you're wondering what you're doing now that you'll regret most later, that's probably it. " This is so incredibly true. Im 3 years out of high school and I have to say, sometimes I wish I was back there!!!! Im still learning though. A very interesting article...though a long read. Im still figuring out what I want to do, but this article does give a few good pointers