In a meeting with an intern a while back, she complained that the things she was studying in school didn’t seem relevant to our work.
“After all”, she said, “how often do we use algebra here?”
I told her she was missing the point.
You don’t go to school to learn things. Not really, anyway.
You go to school to learn how to learn things.
Most of the ways people make money now did not exist when I was in college. There was no way, for instance, they could have taught me how to make iPhone apps – the average person had never even seen a cell phone, and the iPhone was years in the future.
Change is the only certainty, and in the world of the future, you have to be able to learn new things. Because if you don’t, you will get left behind.
As an example: right now everyone says the future of the internet is video. I love writing, and hate being filmed, so it would be easy to ignore them and keep on writing.
But if they are right, then I will one day be as obsolete as a computer programmer who hated all languages other than C++. People who do not change get left behind.
So I am trying to learn how to edit video. I’m not good at it, and the learning curve is steep. But I will get there.