You Won’t Get a Good Job if You Don’t Go to College 
How to succeed at success without really caring what anyone else thinks.
This chapter is for anyone who is, has been, or might someday be tempted to let other people’s definition of success determine the course of their life. The title isn’t meant to be taken literally (at least not by everyone, or all the time), but it is a useful metaphor for the way society imposes arbitrary judgments on what constitutes success and how we’re meant to achieve it. At least I think it’s a useful metaphor. You can decide for yourself. (That’s kind of the point.)
Success is not one-size-fits-all
Your metaphorical “good job” could be any professional or personal accomplishment. And your metaphorical “college degree” could actually be a literal document that catches the eye of a future employer, or it could be an internship at a theater festival that led you to five Oscar nominations and a net worth of $350 million. Tom Hanks never did graduate from Sacramento State, and he seems to be doing okay.
If you equate success with the accumulation of wealth, you could indeed reach that goal by getting a “good” (aka high-paying) job. You could also do it by saving scrupulously, developing your blackjack skills, making smart investments over time, or marrying rich. (Just sayin’.)
Then again, it may not be wealth alone that represents success in your mind, but what you do with it. You could succeed by sending your kids to college or zeroing out your own debt. You could make a down payment on a home, or treat your parents to a fiftieth-anniversary cruise. You might feel the most successful if and when you take all that cash money and give it away to a good cause.
Whatever swabs your deck, sailor!
Or maybe while others prowl the metaphorical high seas for buried treasure, you’re on a different voyage entirely—like the person who responded to my survey saying, “I define success as having flexibility in my life, specifically because I don’t measure success in terms of climbing a career ladder or making more and more money.”
Lovely. Perhaps you’re the same way?
You might be bouncing between credit card bills but feel successful for creating the stable family life you always wanted. Or maybe you’ve succeeded at a more ephemeral achievement—like summiting a mountain, winning an election, or getting through a five-hour bus ride without peeing your pants. The latter is how I measured the success of every other weekend during my senior year of college.
And if your goal is just to get through the day without crying, it’s currently 11:59 p.m., and your eyes are as dry as Norm Macdonald’s delivery—then CONGRATUFUCKINGLATIONS. You have succeeded.
At the end of the day, success is simply the achievement of a goal—any goal—that you set for yourself.
Finding your path to it is not unlike using Google Maps: You type in a destination, it shows you a few different ways to get there, and you pick the one that makes the most sense for you. Less traffic, fewer tolls, scenic route—whatever. You’re successful if you get where you intended to go.
But by the same token, you’re not “unsuccessful” if you never dialed up a particular destination in the first place, regardless of how popular it may be with others. (I draw your attention once again to the ill-advised Heineken factory tour.)
If you didn’t set the “getting a good job” goal—or if the relative quality of your job is not how you measure success—then I’m guessing you also REALLY enjoy your nights and weekends. Woot!
If you didn’t set the “go to college” goal, you had your reasons, and they won’t be costing you an average of $22,693 a year.
And if you didn’t set the “make lots of money” goal, or the “get married” goal, or the “own a home” goal, then not doing or not having those things doesn’t have to cause you stress. Let other people grapple with a complicated tax return, plan a wedding, and gag on monthlies for thirty years. You do you, they do a lot of hyperventilating.
Good hair, don’t care
Whenever somebody asked ten-year-old me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was resolute and unwavering: a hairdresser.
My aunt used to take me along to her appointments at a hip salon in my otherwise extremely unhip home state, and I would watch for hours as clients got bleached, colored, frosted, and highlighted; they walked in with shaggy split ends and out with the asymmetrical bobs and pink Mohawks the late eighties were so fond of. It was, I imagined, like hanging out backstage at MTV. One time, my aunt’s hairdresser Linda—who was at that point the coolest chick I’d ever met and still ranks in the top ten—ran a combful of semipermanent purple dye over my brown hair. You could hardly see it, but I felt like Cyndi fucking Lauper when I walked into school that week.
I’d caught the bug, and it stayed with me for life. Since then I’ve been black-, burgundy-, and red-haired, peroxide blond, Mrs. Mia Wallace from Pulp Fiction and Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. Many hairstylists in New England, New York, and the Dominican Republic have had their way with my Visa card.
But one day when I was probably twelve or thirteen, a friend of my parents asked me that innocent question about my career plans, and she definitely didn’t like the answer. It was as though I’d told her I intended to grow up to be a cardsharp or a foot fetishist. She urged me to consider how much “more” I could do with my life than frost tips and get high on perm fumes.
“Don’t you want to go to college?” she asked.
At the time I’m not sure I even knew whether you needed to go to college to become a hairdresser. I hadn’t given it much thought. I wouldn’t have been opposed to the idea, since “college” was also where, I’d been reliably informed, you could stay up as late as you wanted and eat dinner out of vending machines. But the reason I hadn’t given it much thought was because “what I want to be when I grow up” wasn’t dependent on “how I would get there.”
I just wanted to do hair.
It’s not that I don’t understand where this woman was coming from. But her knee-jerk disapproval of a future that I’d been happily imagining for myself was like a nick to the earlobes with the business end of the shears. It stung, and the feeling stayed with me. I started to think it wouldn’t be “okay” if I became a hairdresser like Linda. That people would be disappointed in me for choosing the kooky, fun camaraderie of a hair salon over, say, the solitary intellectual rigor of higher education.
Gradually the idea of being a hairdresser faded away like a perfect ombré, and I pointed myself toward academia—thinking I’d get a master’s and a PhD and become a professor. Think again! (As you know, by the time I encountered the General Exam, I’d already revised that plan.) A few false starts—an internet boom gig that went bust, six months making minimum wage at a bookstore, a stint as a VIP greeter on Broadway*—and I found my groove as a book editor. Fifteen years later, I threw it all away to make some radical changes and work for myself, and most recently, became a writer whose calling card is “words that can’t be printed in the New York Times.”
My point is, in 1991, none of us had any idea what I would “grow up” to be, so why did it matter so much to my parents’ friend that she would try to dissuade me from a path I was, at the time, really excited about?
Clearly she thought she was helping—the same way everyone who tells me I’ll regret not having children thinks they’re doing me a favor, saving me from myself.
But most of us don’t need saving.
We just need permission to be ourselves, make our own decisions and mistakes, and revel in our own success, whatever that means to us.
It’s time to grant that permission to your own damn self. Because living your life according to other people’s definitions of success is the same as living your life according to other people’s dreams, other people’s fears, and other people’s notions of risk and regret. That’s not helping anybody.
And in the end, the only person it hurts when you shape your life according to other people’s standards?
YOU.
Carry on.