[Music] raise your hand if you're excited to go to college good awesome awesome today I want to introduce you to a concept called driving school for Life an alternative path to life and education there's always been this tension between book smarts and Street smarts and as a son of two doctors book smarts definitely went out in my home took all kinds of AP courses graduated from high school with a 4.0 was voted most likely to succeed uh started UCLA basically as a sophomore and so books smarts definitely went out in my home and it wasn't until a year later that I realized that you actually need both you need both to navigate this life of uncertainty and this fast-paced changing world at the age of 18 I had bought a Mercedes-Benz to show my parents that I was on a path to success just like them and within two weeks of buying that car it was stolen at gunpoint and in that moment my life hit reset and I had to come up with a new framework for how to direct and drive my life and that framework is that your life is your vehicle to design drive and maintain unfortunately a lot of people end up backseat driving through life or they end up driving other people's vehicles and my life and work as an author and as a speaker is all about getting you in the driver's seat of your life we've been told this story that higher education is the path to success and about a four months ago I was at my little brother's graduation he graduated from UC Irvine and I was in the second deck up there I was looking down at all the graduates there and I saw this on a graduate's hat said hire me and I realized that higher education wasn't leading students to getting hired and this is because we've been told this narrative about Easy Street and that the path to Easy Street is to be good get good grades go to a good college and get a good job and we've been reinforcing that with citizenship grades anybody remember the ease from elementary school right GPA the ranks of colleges test scores and salary well there are other ways that we can measure these exact same things we can measure them in hours of service in actual hard and soft skills and level of self-mastery and job satisfaction so every year thousands thousand and thousands and thousands of students are graduating from high school and trying to go to college and graduating from college and trying to make their way into their careers and it looks kind of like the JFK freeway at 7:30 in the morning congested traffic all these students being directed down the same road told that it's going to lead them to being a teacher doctor lawyer engineer or an accountant and what I've discovered as I talk to students is that most students don't want to be any of these things just because I had two parents as doctors didn't mean that I wanted to be a doctor and these aren't the only five prestigious careers that are out there there are actually millions of others and because we don't want to take this path as the millennial generation we're actually called The Lost Generation that we're clueless and that we don't know where we're going and I like to think of us as generation why because we ask the tough questions we ask why is that the way it is and why can I do it this way and so for the students and teachers in the room you have to ask yourself why students you have to ask yourself why do I want to go to college and teachers you have to be able to answer the question why should a student go to college because the why of Easy Street isn't working anymore and so both of us have to tell a bigger story because if the why is money which is one of the reasons people go that's a good guess because college graduates make a million more dollars over the course of their lifetime than someone who just graduates from high school so if that's the reason you're going then that's okay but that is shrinking because if the Y is a job the reality is that only 25% of the class of 2010 had jobs on hand at graduation one quarter and if the why is to learn you can tap your teacher on their shoulder and ask them did you fall asleep in class in college and many of them will be able to say yes and there are a lot cheaper ways to learn this is one of my favorite shirts thanks Wikipedia Why Pay $30,000 a year for an education when you can just get a $30 a month internet subscription and have access to 95% of the same information so I was taken Easy Street about 10 years ago and I went to UCLA but I actually challenged myself a little bit and I graduated in three years because the education system wasn't moving fast enough for me and then two years later I went on to get my MBA and Masters in Education at Stanford at the age of 25 and my education at UCLA cost $225,000 a year my education at Stanford cost about 92,000 and the cost of education is rising over since 1978 the cost of education has risen at 12 times that rate of inflation and since I went to school it is doubled and so when you take the tuition room board and everything that it cost to go to college and you divide that by the number of minutes that a student is actually setting foot on campus we are essentially paying $1 every single minute we are on campus so if you're going to invest that kind of money into your education you want to make sure that you're getting a return on your investment but the reality is that some students are getting a return on their investment 25% of them another group is actually returning to school going to grad school is if grad school is actually going to answer the questions that didn't get answered during undergrad and then then another group of students is actually returning home so these are the guaranteed Paths of higher education today because when our parents went to school it was pretty simple all they had to do was outperform the person on their left and the person on their right in high school and they were going to be okay when I went to school and graduated from high school in 2000 all I had to do was outperform the students in my state in the state of California and I was going to be able to get into one of the better uc's and I got into UCLA thankfully but for you you are competing against everyone in your age group in the entire world so what are you going to do to stand out on top of that just by being American doesn't give you a competitive advantage and the world is now flat because of globalization and the expansion of the internet so if you expect to do the same things that your teachers did or that I did and have the exact same results I guarantee you will not have them and a 4.0 GPA in the way that we measure it today isn't going to guarantee you success in the real world so easy street is actually fading in the background and today I want to share with you how to pave your own path and I want to introduce you to the 4.0 that really matters that's going to help you develop your street smarts and that 4.0 is your personal Capital your intellectual Capital your social capital and your financial Capital your personal capital is how well you know yourself it's your sense of strengths it's your sense of your strengths your purpose your your passion your skills your entrepreneurial Spirit your problem solving ability when the world looks at you they just see you as this little kitten but when you look at yourself in the mirror you actually see something more powerful more capable someone who actually wants to create more value than you're being allowed to your intellectual capital is your expertise in one or two subjects or skills most college students graduate from college after four years of majoring in something and if you ask them to lecture for one hour on whatever it is that they majored in on stage at that moment they would feel uncomfortable doing so so your intellectual Capital may have nothing to do with your major or even a subject in school right now Zoe's intellectual capital is her passion for fashion that rhymes right okay your third capital is your Social Capital this is who you know and who knows you your mentors professors teachers your parents Friends Community leaders I found that the most powerful way to network is networking up you want a network with people who are on the other side of the door that you're trying to get into your peers can get you to the door but they can't open the door with you for you and it doesn't matter how many Facebook friends you have they are not your Social Capital next is your financial Capital now this is a tricky one it's who knows that you know what you know it's where your intellectual Capital what you know intersects with who knows you and when that occurs Financial opportunities flow the reason I'm able to get paid to speak all over the nation is because the right people at companies colleges and high schools know that I know a lot about helping this generation reach its full potential and when those two things intersect Financial opportunities occur so this is how you develop your street smarts these are the four things that you want to focus on this is the 4.0 that matters and as you think about the college you want to go to you want to choose a Campus based on its intellectual Capital its social capital and its Financial Capital because you want to graduate more valuable afterwards than you were when you came in so its intellectual Capital includes its classes its libraries its databases its professors it's Social Capital includes it's alumni networks it's student groups and it's Financial Capital includes financial aid scholarships grants Etc so this is how you want to choose a college this is why I chose Stanford I didn't choose Stanford Graduate School of Business to become a consultant to become a banker or the traditional five path that students take out of there I chose it because of its capital and you want to choose your next step in your education process based on that so the real question is how would you invest four years of time if your life depended on it because at the end of the day all this is is an expensive college degree major debt minor capital and no matter if you go to the bookstore and put it in an expensive frame at the end of the day it's still just a piece of paper and its value will be determined by what you do in between orientation and graduation that's it so is college worth it the answer is yes yes yes but your major may not matter so you need to master yourself succeed in the classroom and get that other 4.0 but take risk on your college campus and fail as much as you can outside of the classroom remember that you are buying experience not just in education and that this is an investment in your dream not the guarantee of a job so you have two options to try to take the easy Road and hope that you may it through or you can pave your own Road in the way that I have in the way that other speakers have that you've heard today and I'd like to conclude with a short song in in light of the fact that we're here in Chicago I'm going to reference a Chicago musician John Legend and I'm going to close with this we're extraordinary people and we know which way to go we're Extraordinary People maybe we should PVE the Road thank [Applause] [Music] you