Disagreeableness. 😉 (diary) I treated college as a purely commercial exercise a

Disagreeableness. 😉

(diary)

I treated college as a purely commercial exercise and couldn’t have cared less about grades, homework, professors’ opinions, or anything other than whether I was learning something I thought was interesting and valuable. I loved my education in the arts. I still do. its precious to me. I loved contract law. I found political science immoral. I found engineering obvious and tedious. And my only major mistake was not moving into literature when the department asked me. If I’d taken philosophy and literature I would have excelled more so than in the arts – where my primary concern was technique theory and history. I never had any intention of doing anything other than running a business. Education was purely ‘for me’. But I might have had a very different life if someone had said “you know, when a department asks you to join you don’t say no unless you have a very good reason”. I didn’t have a reason to say no. I loved college. I only realized much later that my health problems started early – probably when I got that damned flu. I kept take classes in something or other until the dot com era, where it was simply too impossible to make time. Founding Ascentium was just a dead heat from day one and between that and health I didn’t have anything left. I was pretty ill I think by the time I left college. I just didn’t feel right. And so began a lifetime of doctors without letting anyone know I was having health problems because it’s damaging to your career. That said, founded or built one company after another until illness convinced me that it was do or die so to speak, and that if I didn’t start working full time on it I wouldn’t have time for it.

What’s the lesson here? I dunno. i certainly wouldn’t have taken the AI->Law -> Hayek->Popper -> economics route if I’d done it otherwise, so it’s a choice between two worlds one of which exists and one of which is only imagined.

Best advice from an older family member: “You never want to be forty and say ‘I wish I had….’. I took it. I didn’t. I don’t. Not because this path has been other than fulfilling, but that I simply wonder what that other path might have led to. I think I might have been a lot happier in some ways and not in others.