Back in college before he co-founded Twitter, Biz Stone had a part-time job moving heavy boxes in a storage facility for a major publisher. Back in high school, Biz had taught himself a bit about graphic design and photoshop. One day while the art department was out to lunch, Biz found a package about to be shipped with proposed jacket designs for a new book about The Allman Brothers Band. He jumped on a computer, designed his own cover, and shipped it with the package. The publisher chose his cover, and two days later, the art director offered him a full-time job. That’s when Biz decided to drop out of college.
I don’t advocate dropping out of college and neither does Biz. But as he relates in this passage from his book, Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of a Creative Mind, one of the best things you can do is create your own opportunities.
“I’m not advocating dropping out. I could have entered college with more focus in the first place, or I could have tried to change my experience when I got there. But taking a job that I’d won through my initiative was another way of controlling my destiny. This, as I see it, was an example of manufacturing my own opportunities. This is why starting a lacrosse team, producing a play, launching your own company, or actively building the company you work for is all more creatively fulfilling and potentially lucrative than simply doing what is expected of you. In order to have a vision for a business, or for your own potential, you must allocate space for that vision. I want to play on a sports team. I didn’t make it on a team. How can I reconcile these truths? I don’t like my job, but I love this one tiny piece of it, so how can I do that instead? Real opportunities in the world aren’t listed on job boards, and they don’t pop up in your inbox with the subject line: Great Opportunity Could Be Yours. Inventing your dream is the first and biggest step toward making it come true. Once you realize this simple truth, a whole new world of possibilities opens up in front of you.”
I don’t think this example falls apart just because Biz didn’t make an opportunity on a college campus. The benefit of college is how many opportunities you have to make an opportunity for yourself. You have a choice to make once you get to college. You can use that time to prepare for life, when you push and maybe even allow yourself to fail. Or keep your head down and wait for your college to just hand a great opportunity to you (which almost never happens). No surprise which path I’d recommend.
You can start in high school by thinking hard about why you want to go to college and what you hope to experience while you’re there, then finding the schools that fit regardless of whether or not they’re prestigious. Find the right places for you to go make your own opportunity.