How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life by Scott Adams Read Free Book Online Page B

money too went toward our education. It wasn’t nearly enough, but it was a step in the right direction.
    My mother decided that I should become a lawyer. She spent a good deal of energy convincing me that it was a good plan. The two lawyers in our town were doing well, and my grades seemed strong enough to make a legitimate run at the legal profession. I didn’t knowmuch about the job of lawyering, but I did like the idea of making good money and someday escaping my little town. I signed on to my mother’s plan and set my sights on a career in law. All I needed to do was figure out how to pay for college.
    One day in eleventh grade health class our gym teacher/health teacher mentioned that our small school (there were about forty kids in my class) had never produced a student who earned an academic scholarship to college. He explained that one unusually tall and athletic student had managed to get a basketball scholarship before blowing out his knee in his freshman year, but no one had earned a college scholarship based on academics alone. The teacher speculated with confidence that this was about to change. He announced that one student in our grade was likely to get an academic scholarship. This news surprised me. I looked around my small classroom and couldn’t figure out whom he meant. Curiosity got the best of me and I raised my hand. “Who are you talking about?” He stared at me in a gym-coach way, either annoyed or surprised by the question. Then he answered in a confident voice, “You.”
    I didn’t believe him. He was just one guy with an opinion. But my mother told me I was going to college one way or another, so I set about the task of figuring out how that happens. This was well before the days of highly involved parents. I was pretty much on my own. Our guidance counselor pointed to a wall-length shelf that was full of college pamphlets and books and gave me this valuable career guidance: Pick a few colleges that look good and fill out some applications. This was not the precise sort of career advice that one would hope for. I skimmed a few college books and felt lost. How could I possibly know the best choice for me?
    Luckily, a new kid had joined my class a year earlier. New students were rare. I attended kindergarten with about thirty-five of the forty kids I graduated with, and most of those classes were in the same building. This new kid, Peter, came from some exotic city, or maybe it was a suburb, where people knew how the world worked. I followed his lead and did what he did. I decided to major in economics because Peter told me that would be a good prelaw degree. Then I followed him around in the guidance counselor’s tiny library of college information and learned that the process for applying to each college was described in those books. Eventually I picked two colleges that looked good on paper. And by that I mean the schools were locatedwithin driving distance, they offered degrees in economics, and the photographs of their campuses were pleasing.
    My first choice, Cornell, had two factors working against it. The first was a tragic men-to-women ratio that guaranteed I would graduate a virgin. The other was that I applied too late and missed its deadline. Cornell informed me that I was on its wait list. My only chance of getting into that school was if some sort of fast-moving plague killed all of the people who knew there was a deadline for applying.
    The only other college I applied to was Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. Hartwick had several things going for it. It was a one-hour drive from home, so travel would be affordable. It had a well-respected nursing major, so there were more women than men. And it accepted me. It was my only option. This is when I learned that one should not seek life-altering advice from a kid named Peter whose primary credentials were that he once lived in a suburb or maybe a city. Either way, it was a bad idea to apply to only two colleges and a worse