Snippet 10: Advice Every Student Needs To Hear - Noah Kagan
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- Hey friends, welcome back to the Deep Dive Snippet. This is a clip from my interview with serial entrepreneur Noah Kagan, and we're talking about advice that every student needs to hear while they are a student. So I hope you enjoy it. I think in school, in college and university, you've just got so much spare time on your hands. And I don't think we really appreciate this when we're going through it, but when you start working,

especially if you're working like a normal kind of a normal job like nine to five it ends up never being nine to five you end up at work until seven if not later every day you end up having so much less time on your hands and so when you're at school i think really take advantage of all of that just ridiculous amount of free time you have and occasionally i i get messages from people being like hey when i get home i do my homework and then it's time for bed and that's just unfathomable because if you get home from school at like say five you do your homework for let's say two hours you still got between seven and eleven to just do whatever you want

And high school is the time where, for example, I learned to code. I taught myself design. I took on lots of these different hobbies that now, looking back, I'm so glad I went down these rabbit holes. Because at the time, it didn't seem like it would be particularly helpful. Or just like, oh, this is cool. I'm making like $10 here and there making a website. But now, like, those skills compound on themselves so much over time. And you feel really glad that you spent that time in high school. Having said that, I did spend about four hours a day playing World of Warcraft for three years. Happiest time of my life, but...

Now you can make a living doing that, though, which is wild. Yeah, that's true. That's true. One thing I want to highlight, though, I thought about this with Twitch because my friends work at League of Legends and so forth. And we see people that are Twitch people that make a million dollars. That's only the top 10. And so I think the thing that's interesting there is that you can follow your passion. So I think people are asking, how do I find my passion? Try a lot of things out and find out the stuff that you're like excited to keep doing.

And so with the Twitch stuff, if you're not able to make it in the top 10, there's still a lot of opportunity to start businesses or get jobs in gaming, right? Like you can start a marketplace for gamers or you can sell books for teaching people how to game or you can do gaming parties. There's a lot of opportunities if you're not in that thing. For me, I think where I've done success in my career by my own self, I think success is a horrible word, by the way. Yeah, I think it's a dirty word because success is what we tell everyone else. Oh, Ali is successful.

This person is successful. And I think we have to decide our own metric of success in this life. I think that's almost one of the most important things. And so for me, it's like when I've chased money and opportunity, I've been less fulfilled. I've sustained it and I've made less money when I just said, hey, I really love doing these things. I don't really care how much money ends up making. I've made the most money.

Yeah, that's my theory for it as well. It's like the first question, is this thing fun? And if it's fun, then I'll probably do it. If it's not fun but makes money, then I probably won't. I think early on, I was more open to doing things that weren't fun but that made money. But now I realize actually, especially once you've got some level of success, it just makes so much more sense to just do the stuff that fills you with joy, as corny and hippie as that sounds. I think that's exactly it, man.

learn a new hobby learn a new skill level up what you're doing like the existing stuff that you're doing because that is the stuff that will synergize firstly with your studies it'll make it more interesting like for me so many more doors have opened in medicine because of the fact that i can make a pretty looking website then because of the fact that i'm i scored one percent higher than someone else in an anatomy exam i've been invited onto the committee of this like super big plastic surgery charity and

just because I could make their website look cool. And I was like, hey, you guys need a cool looking website. Here are some examples. I'll do it for free. And they were like, sure, come on board. See, that's awesome. And I got access to this whole network of like amazing consultant plastic surgeons and doing cool stuff. And then through off the back of that, that led to me helping develop an app for like remote augmented reality, remote assistance for surgery in low resource areas. And all of this stuff came about because of my interest in web design, not because I

I spent my summer holidays trying to get a head start on learning anatomy. And so that would be one thing that I would strongly advise anyone who's a student at the moment. Use your free time to learn the other stuff. Don't worry about using your free time to learn the student stuff because that happens by default in your day job. You know, I double majored in business and economics, and I literally don't think I've used one thing from that after I graduated. All of my learning is experience.

And so I think what you're saying is a great point is like just start exploring different things, start helping different people, start either physically being around other people or online, like part of your community, be a part of Ali's community. There's a bunch of people here that want to be more productive. They're thinking about exploring life and you'll be able to get ahead, not get ahead, but I think you'll be able to find your answers faster. Hmm.