http://mattinglot.com/blog/2006/06/01/how-taking-a-year-off-before-university-can-change-your-life/ Thoughts and Stories of an Entrepreneur on the Web Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:59:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.4 http://mattinglot.com/blog/2006/06/01/how-taking-a-year-off-before-university-can-change-your-life/#comment-5330 Wed, 08 Nov 2006 17:43:50 +0000 http://mattinglot.com/blog/2006/06/01/how-taking-a-year-off-before-university-can-change-your-life/#comment-5330 [...] Luckily the entrepreneurial bone in me activated and gave me some business experience before I ever filled out the university application form that would have doomed me to writing boring code for stuffy monolithic corporations and unwittingly providing material for Office Space 2. I was exposed there to a strange freedom that was offered nowhere else. I read some extremely positive literature from people that seemed… happy. This was a world that my programming books had never exposed me to. Never before had I seriously read about ideas like goals, personal development, financial planning, and the idea that becoming truly successfully was something other than luck or born talent. It was enough to make me consciously realize what my subconscious had known all along - I wasn’t ready to spend another 4 years in school to prepare myself to be someone’s slave doing something that I already knew I would dislike. It’s not that I disliked programming - I’m having an absolute blast putting my skills to use with my website development company - it’s that I enjoyed working on projects of my own devising and not some insigificant clog in an obese software application. I took a year and a half off instead of going straight into university during which I awakened consciously further and further. [...] […] Luckily the entrepreneurial bone in me activated and gave me some business experience before I ever filled out the university application form that would have doomed me to writing boring code for stuffy monolithic corporations and unwittingly providing material for Office Space 2. I was exposed there to a strange freedom that was offered nowhere else. I read some extremely positive literature from people that seemed… happy. This was a world that my programming books had never exposed me to. Never before had I seriously read about ideas like goals, personal development, financial planning, and the idea that becoming truly successfully was something other than luck or born talent. It was enough to make me consciously realize what my subconscious had known all along - I wasn’t ready to spend another 4 years in school to prepare myself to be someone’s slave doing something that I already knew I would dislike. It’s not that I disliked programming - I’m having an absolute blast putting my skills to use with my website development company - it’s that I enjoyed working on projects of my own devising and not some insigificant clog in an obese software application. I took a year and a half off instead of going straight into university during which I awakened consciously further and further. […]

]]> http://mattinglot.com/blog/2006/06/01/how-taking-a-year-off-before-university-can-change-your-life/#comment-471 Fri, 02 Jun 2006 20:36:03 +0000 http://mattinglot.com/blog/2006/06/01/how-taking-a-year-off-before-university-can-change-your-life/#comment-471 Agreed, although my experience was slightly different. Ater finishing 2 years of Science 'pre-college' here in Canada, I was frightened off by an intimidating university Engineering program (for example, foreign profs whose accent I could not understand), a direction that I was unsure of. So I took a year 'off', got a job in a bookstore, and saved enough to take a trip across the continent. The job experience taught me that higher education is a good thing, and I went back to school... and never regretted it. Agreed, although my experience was slightly different. Ater finishing 2 years of Science ‘pre-college’ here in Canada, I was frightened off by an intimidating university Engineering program (for example, foreign profs whose accent I could not understand), a direction that I was unsure of. So I took a year ‘off’, got a job in a bookstore, and saved enough to take a trip across the continent. The job experience taught me that higher education is a good thing, and I went back to school… and never regretted it.

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