Welcome to Litsy!

I was nodding my head to basically everything during the first part of the book. Then I felt the author started focusing way too much on how bad “elite” (I.e Ivy League) schools were and how students at elite schools get everything handed to them on a platter, which detracted from the overall message of the book for me. Definitely some confirmation bias here. But the I would recommend it for the first part.

I recently heard from a high school student who was trying to decide between Harvard, Stanford, and Yale... The students, the teachers, the mentality, the madness: at those and other top-tier schools, they're all essentially the same. The rest is marketing and ego...."the narcissism of small differences"--the meaningless distinctions people make to feel superior to those who are exactly like them.

But there is something that‘s a great deal more important than parental approval: learning to do without it. That‘s what it means to become an adult.

Life is more than a job; jobs are more than a paycheck; and a country is more than its wealth. Education is more than the acquisition of marketable skills, and you are more than your ability to contribute to your employer‘s bottom line or the nation‘s GDP, no matter what the rhetoric of politicians or executives would have you think. To ask what college is for is to ask what life is for, what society is for—what people are for.

The purpose of college...is to turn adolescents into adults...The idea that we should take the first four years of young adulthood and devote them to career preparation alone, neglecting every other part of life, is nothing short of an obscenity...And if you find yourself to be the same person at the end of college as you were at the beginning - the same beliefs, values, desires, goals... - then you did it wrong. Go back and do it again.

I didn't know how blind I was until I read this book. It may sound a cliché but it changed my life. It showed me that feeling crazy because I valued free time over busyness was the wrong way to think about it. Being busy doesn't mean your productive. Success is not the amount of money you earn.

"People don't mind feeling trapped as long as no one else is free."

"That's how envy works: the better things are, the worse they are, because they don't belong to you."

"Hovering and criticism, should not be confused with attention or guidance."

"When your kid gets into a prestigious college, it's as if you got an A in being a parent. And nothing less that that, of course, will do."

"Parents often try to mend the mistakes in their life by guiding their children on the path they themselves wishes they had the courage to wonder."

"If love for money tends to win out, that is largely because so many kids leave college without a sense of inner purpose - I other words of what else might be worth your time."

"The purpose of life becomes the accumulation of gold stars. Hence the relentless extracurricular busyness, the neglect of learning as an end itself. The inability to imagine doing something that you can't put on your resume."