Newton came to Cambridge in 1661, and the curriculum was scholastic philosophy, classical languages, Euclidean geometry. Medieval education that hadn’t changed for 200 years. Newton ignored it. He went to the library and devoured the moderns instead, reading Descartes, Galileo, Kepler, filling notebooks with his own experiments and observations. When plague closed Cambridge in 1665, he went home to Woolsthorpe and invented calculus, discovered gravity, developed his theory of light, all in the span of a few years away from the institution that would later claim credit for his genius.
Cambridge provided library access, time without financial pressure, and eventually the Lucasian Professor title that let him publish, but we credit Cambridge for making Newton, and in doing so we confuse correlation with causation.
The university is the archive, and this is its true function. It stores the cumulative knowledge of humanity, and this is valuable. Newton needed the archive to access what Galileo and Descartes had discovered before him. But we must distinguish the archive from the lab. The archive teaches you what is known. The lab is where you discover what is unknown. Universities sell the archive but market it as the lab. They train students in retrieval, in passing tests on known facts, and call it discovery, call it innovation.
And somewhere along the way, you lost your way. You came here to impact the world, to build something that matters. But now you’re optimizing for grades, targeting brand-name internships, building resumes for consulting or tech. You’re playing the game the institution designed instead of the game you came here to play.
You’re at Stanford (or some other colleges). Which game are you playing?
Most students play the status-seeking game where they pursue credentials. Successful companies grew rapidly and needed to hire thousands of people, and how do you evaluate capability at scale? You use degrees/internships as filters. The feedback loop forms quickly. Companies require degrees. Ambitious people get degrees. Degrees correlate with ambition, but this is a selection effect, not causal. Companies see the correlation and double down on requiring degrees. Now everyone needs degrees to access opportunity.
And when a credential becomes the target, it stops measuring capability. Goodhart’s Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Students stop asking what do I want to do and start asking what credential should I get next. Education becomes a substitute for thinking about the future, a way to defer the difficult questions about meaning and purpose.
Students face uncertainty about their future, and this uncertainty is uncomfortable. “What should I do with my life? What if I fail? What if I make the wrong choice?” The credential offers an answer. “Follow this path, get good grades, land the internship, and you’ll be fine.” This predictability is seductive because it saves you from the harder work of defining your own direction, of figuring out what you actually want. But predictability and exploration are opposites.
And when you use credentials as the answer, you end up competing with everyone else doing the same thing. Everyone races for the same credentials in the same order. The prestigious university, then the prestigious company, then the prestigious exit. Harvard then Goldman then private equity. Stanford then OpenAI then YC-backed startup. The names change but the pattern is identical. But the competition itself proves you’re using credentials as a substitute for direction. If you knew what you wanted to do, there would be no competition because you’d be the only one doing your specific thing. This is Girard’s mimetic theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimetic_theory). You want what others want because their wanting it validates that you’re on the right path. Peter Thiel described Harvard faculty dynamics like this “The battles were so ferocious because the stakes were so small.” When objective differences between people are tiny, when everyone has similar credentials and achievements, you fight harder to maintain whatever small distinctions remain.
So which game should you play? The question isn’t university or not, I believe it’s how you use the university and from here, I see two paths. (1) Following the prescribed path, optimizing for grades and credentials and safe internships, gives you near certainty of becoming a competent specialist but low probability of breakthrough. (2) Using the university as Newton did, ignoring prescribed metrics while exploiting resources like library access, compute, labs, peers, and time, lets you pursue obsessions with a hedge against downside risk.
Most people should take the first path (I wrote about this here). We need more labor in the world (as AI/robot are still premature). But if you’re reading this and feeling restless, if you chose Stanford for its resources rather than its credential, you might be trying to play the wrong game by the wrong rules. I strongly believe that it’s elite institutions’s responsibility to select for those who will change the world rather than outputting labors.
Universities are excellent filters. Too excellent, perhaps. They identify and admits exceptional people, but we confuse filtering with transforming. We think Stanford makes people smart when really Stanford just selected people who were already going to succeed. Cambridge selected Newton. It didn’t transform him into a genius. He was already a genius when he arrived.
The trap is expecting the institution to transform you, to make you into something you’re not already becoming. It won’t. You transform yourself through the work you choose to do, the obsessions you choose to follow.
The credential is just a library card - it gets you into the room where the knowledge is kept, but the library is silent. The innovation happens when you make noise, when you stop consuming what’s already known and start creating what doesn’t exist yet. Do not mistake the access for the action. Or precisely, the purpose of knowledge is action, found via tinkering.
Inspiration: