From a lecture Warren Buffet gave at Norte Dame in 1991:
“You’d get very rich if you thought of yourself as having a card with only twenty punches in a lifetime, and every financial decision used up one punch. You’d resist the temptation to dabble. You’d make more good decisions and you’d make more big decisions.”
I love that saying not because of its financial implications (though it’s certainly smart there, too), but because you can apply it to many areas of your life.
You can think of punches as days in your favorite teacher’s class, practices with your team, meetings of your club or organization, shifts at your part-time job, nights out with your friends, etc.
Dabbling isn’t necessarily bad. I don’t think you should hesitate to take a short, fun glassblowing class at a community center because you feel pressured to save that hole punch spot for something bigger and more important.
But if you’re going to take the class, make it worth the hole punch. Sit in the front. Ask questions. Really extract as much from it as you can. Make the hole punch worth it.
And I really can’t think of a better way to get the most out of college.
You’ll have a limited number of days as a college student. Make every one of them worth the hole punch. Whether you’re sitting in a Nobel-Prize-winning professor’s class, studying for a final, participating in a club, working at an internship, or hanging out on a Tuesday night with your new friends in the dorm (those nights are some of the best in college), soak it in and make each day punch worthy.