My school reports said the same thing in a dozen different handwritings. Smart but lazy. He should apply himself more. Capable of much better.
School was OK. We were in the first year of the new comprehensive system: the old Secondary Modern became the local Comprehensive. I slogged it out, and nothing stretched me much. I got a couple of early O levels (the GCSEs of their day), some good final grades and a couple of higher-level A-level equivalents. Job done. Off to sixth form college.
College was different. Ex-grammar school. More formal. More ‘traditional’. That’s where I started to check out. I was more interested in how the businesses I worked for part-time actually ran, and in what I could do with an old reel-to-reel tape recorder and some early freelance programming (an Apple II if I remember correctly).
Attendance wasn’t optional, but no one tracked it much. Maria’s Café in Fareham had the first Space Invaders machine in the area. There was a student magazine office to hang out in. Nothing about the teaching engaged me.
The reports weren’t wrong about the results. They were wrong about the reason. I wasn’t lazy. I was bored. While the blah-blah-blah washed over me at the front of the class, my head was in the garage at home, working out how to take apart the old TV, or planning my next program for the Sinclair ZX80.
Then I contracted pneumonia over Christmas just before my mock exams and missed them all. I walked into my A-levels without a single dry run, and failed them. With them went the plan to go to university.
So I slipped into Portsmouth Polytechnic through clearing, started a degree, and came out a couple of years later with an HND I’d scraped. At twenty, that felt like the end of something.
It was the start of everything. Forty-odd years later, I’ve been a software engineer, product manager, web designer, technical director, general manager, and now CTO. I’ve travelled the world and worked with incredible partners in the USA, across Europe, India, China and Japan. I completed an MBA with distinction, and I’m still building things. So if you’re leaving school, college or university right now, whether it went well or not, here’s what I wish someone had told me.
1. Your grades are a snapshot, not a verdict
Exams measure how well you performed on a particular few days, at a particular kind of test, on subjects someone else picked. That’s all they measure. Mine closed one door. They didn’t decide who I’d become, and yours won’t either. Nobody has asked me about my A-levels in forty years.
2. Plan B is often the better road
Polytechnic wasn’t my plan. It was what was left. It turned out to suit me far better than the university I’d missed, because it was practical, applied and close to real work. The side roads are slower and windier, but they’re where the interesting stuff is. Don’t treat the detour as a failure until you’ve seen where it goes.
3. “Smart but lazy” usually means bored
If a teacher ever wrote that about you, take a second look. Lazy people don’t spend their weekends taking apart a television to see how it works. Pay attention to what you do when nobody’s making you. That’s not a distraction from your real work. It’s a clue to what your real work is.
4. Learn your own operating manual
Some brains are built for deep focus, patterns and getting lost in a problem, and not for sitting still through things they can’t see the point of. Whatever label fits yours (I’m in my sixties and still working mine out), it isn’t broken. Remember the few teachers who really got you and lit you up? They didn’t change how you think. They taught to it. Work out what conditions bring out your best, and then go looking for them. It took me far too long to do this. Start now.
5. Build things, and finish some of them
A certificate says you sat a course. Something you’ve built shows what you can do. I was doing freelance programming before I’d sat a single A-level, and nobody ever asked for my certificates. You have tools I could only dream of at your age: free software, the whole internet, 3D printers, social media and AI that will help you code, design and write. Make things. Put them where people can see them. And finish some of them, because the last 20% is where most people give up and where you learn the most.
6. Your first job is a start, not a sentence
Take the junior role. Ask stupid questions. Learn how a real organisation works. My first job turned into forty years, and some of the best work I’ve done happened there. But loyalty isn’t obligation. If the people at the top stop backing you or what you’ve built, believe it the first time.
7. Work out what actually drives you
For some people it’s money, status or security. For me it’s meaning, freedom and working with people I like. None of these is better than the others, but if you don’t know which is yours, you’ll chase someone else’s and wonder why it feels empty. Whatever drives you, learn the numbers anyway. Meaning without a P&L is a hobby.
8. Say yes to responsibility before you feel ready
In my Saturday and holiday jobs, I somehow kept ending up in charge. Holiday cover, keys, “can you manage the place this week?” People often see something in you before you see it yourself. When responsibility comes your way, take it. You’ll grow into it faster than you’d expect, and you’ll learn more from doing it badly than from never doing it at all.
9. Find out how you come across, sooner rather than later
You can’t see yourself from the outside, and nobody can without help. Ask people you trust for honest feedback, and listen without getting defensive. It feels uncomfortable. Learning always does. It’s the cheapest upgrade you’ll ever get.
10. Stay weird, and stay unfinished
The world will spend a lot of effort pruning you into the same shape as everyone else. Resist some of it. My best work was usually the stuff nobody asked for, like redesigning software “off book” because nobody else had seen the PC coming. And there’s no point where you arrive. I went back to school in my fifties and I’m building apps with AI in my sixties. Your formal education is ending. Your education isn’t.
Leaving education isn’t the end of learning. It’s the end of the part someone else designed. The rest is yours.
Honestly? I’d love to be where you are now and do it all again.
— Chris (Chip, to those who knew me then)