Go to school. Go to university. Get a job and have a family.
This is the path we are all supposed to take. It's a path that has been engraved in most of
our minds and the path that most of us take in order to feel successful.
This may surprise a lot of you as I'm starting my fifth year of university
but I am a high school dropout. It was august 17, 2017. Wearing the same tie I had worn
for the past five years, i walked into my principal's office on that sunny Thursday
and filled out my form to confirm that I was leaving school. The conversation didn't even last
three minutes before I was out of the door to say goodbye to my teachers and peers. Now this could
be the story of how I made the best decision of my life and everything that followed went smoothly,
but this was not quite the case. This is not the story about how I became a millionaire 18.
Nor is an anecdote for why you should drop out of school. These are lessons from my gap year.
You see one thing that happens when you leave school before everyone else
is that you isolate yourself from your peers. Naturally being in different environments and
different stages of your life you won't have as much in common with your friends as you once did.
Until you leave high school most of your friendships are easy to make,
but out of convenience. You have a lot more friends but a lot less genuine connections.
As you leave the educational system, you leave the comfort of having people constantly around you.
You learn how to be independent on a whole new level. It's a whole lot harder to make
friends but the friends you do make are more organic and have more in common with you.
You might not come out of your gap year knowing where exactly you want your life to go,
but you certainly have more of an idea of where you don't want it to go. During my gap year I
didn't figure out the career path I wanted to take but I discovered where my passions lied: in
languages and culture. I was open to so many more work opportunities I didn't even know existed.
By taking a year out you have the time to think sincerely about what will make you happy,
not what will sound impressive to your peers. You make more mistakes as no one is there to
guide you and you get comfortable with your own choices as there's no one to fall back on.
There's definitely a superiority complex with academic knowledge and life experience. It
sounds way more impressive to say you've got your masters in business instead of working your way
up a company. This is a mindset we need to change though. At 17 I could talk about movies in Spanish
and discuss the impressionist impact on modern art but I couldn't handle my finances and I absolutely
could not navigate a solo travel. The educational system cannot teach you empathy or morals
that is something you have to figure out alone. As much as school teaches you a lot of tools that you
can apply in later life, there's greater wisdom in learning things for your own experiences.
Probably the most important lesson that I learned during my year
was how to react to adversity. In high school we are protected by this bubble of security
for as long as we play by their roles we're not exposed to much adversity but when you take a
year out to work and travel your whole life is about learning adaptability. You're constantly
meeting new people, traveling to new cultures and figuring out how to adjust the new situations.
I was supposed to end this year and start studying law at a prestigious university,
instead I followed my passions and started studying foreign languages. I was supposed
to graduate alongside all my friends, but instead I learned how to be comfortable alone.
I was supposed to have impressive grades that would look good to the people around me,
but I learned way more about life than educational system could ever teach me. All in 365 days.
So what's the greatest lesson for my gap year? You can have your whole life planned out but your
life tends to have something else in mind. so embrace the change that comes your way.
I'm trying to hit 100 000 by the end of the year.
I know it's a crazy number but without a goal we can't score.
So if you enjoyed this video maybe consider hitting subscribe, it would mean a lot to me.
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