Advice to a College Grad from a Boomer.

The Speedometer of your life.

A friend's son graduated from Georgia Southern this Christmas. I don't know why I Went Long on the ‘Congratulations’ Facebook comments rick-roll under the Celebration posted by his mom, but I decided to hang onto it, and pipe into a Substack post. I had a busy day of calls and follow ups to make, and suddenly I spent an unplanned hour and half, writing Boomer Advice in a comment, and then spawning an entire Substack post about it.

At least I have something to show for the time!

“Wow! Congratulations! What an amazing Christmas To remember!

Here's some unsolicited advice from someone you would call a boomer. Actually, my dad, born in 1947, is the Baby Boomer. I'm GenX. Way different from ‘Boomers’, but much more similar to the Boomers than any of the younger generatinal groups.

We were also the very last cohort to make it thru high school and University before the All Seeing Eye of texting, email, and mobile phones put us on digital lockdown, shackled with a digital lo-jack, providing a drop line of low quality endorphin precursors.

Whew. By accident, I lucked out. I had 24 good years before I made the fatal mistake of adapting mobile technology, and diving in head first as an early adapter.

Here's my unsolicited, probably ‘mansplained’ advice.

If you think you're too old to do something.. go find a car with a speedomater, one that has a range of numbers on a dial. Next, if you have a crazy fast car , Bracket Out the Zero to 120mph.

Take a long stare at that bracket. Your at around 22mph. You probably graduated high school at 18mph. Med school? Maybe 30mph and you're a doctor, an actual doctor. 60mph? With advances in food, healthcare, gene therapy, etc your generation should be up and kicking it until your at least 75mph. You will probably live until you're 120, and probably much longer of science keeps improving things.

So pace yourself, get all your education done while you don't have huge expenses and investments of your time (kids, houses, pets, medical conditions, recovering from business mistakes, running successful businesses or a career These make learning later much less appealing or accessible, even if you have the money and time.

So best wishes, and while you're driving to your next endeavor, use the speedometer to benchmark where you actually are.”

What I didn't spiel on about, but probably should have..

Meanwhile, if you come up with a cool idea, or have a special skill, don't assume it's not unique, or the tech is well-established, or someone already had the idea. Even if they did have the idea, it’s very likely they will not take it anywhere for whatever reasons Life, Spirit, and Universe sends their way. The Reality is many people have great ideas, ideas that could curee cancers and make a peaceful, safe, healthy planet. And yet, the Reality is also that few people are either inclined or empowered to pursue these ideas, and so they remain Wonderfully Possible, and seemingly Out of Reach.

I had tons of ideas right when the Internet was spawning some of the most transformational business and social ideas mankind has ever experienced.

I was an early adapter of the Internet, using a modem to access Unix systems and ‘mainframes’ over a telnet connection.

I rigged my Epson Intel x86 laptop in 1994 to my CellularOne Motorola wing phone to “surf the ‘net”. Yep, it was called ‘Websurfing’.

From as early as 1991, I began running multiboot Intel x86 computers with Windows, PS2, and Linux (0.9 Ygdrasil).. accessing the internet over dial up with a command prompt. I sought out creative ways to have Always On access, and access from any coffee shop or mountain top.

In 1995, we used Ham Radio to dial up from Parleys Summit off I-80 near Park City, just to say we did it. In those days we poured syrup all over and ate “Proofs of Concepts” for Breakfast, not even realizing their market value, just naively having a lot of fun geeking out with all the new tech and toys.

For example, I setup a rendering farm for 3D images using x86 desktops running Linux Beowulf, inspired by an article in Linux Journal detailing the rendering setup for the first Jurassic Park movie. I even ran that 3D file manager we all saw in the movie, when the girl was trying to lock the Veloceraptors out of the computer lab, rebooting all the security systems. That was the file manager and SGIrix workstations. That same file manager could be navigated with a VR headset and a “Data Glove”. Once a friend and I even rigged a stenographer pad in 1993 with a small fanny pack (UK= bum pouch?) sized computer, and tiny head mounted heads up display covering one eye. We could walk around campus using ham radio data connection at 2.4kbs to access the Internet over telnet on a Linux system.

We even used CUSeeMe (later locked down as Microsoft Netmeeting) to interactively broadcast a concert from Café Brasíl in the Faubourg Marigny next to the French Quarter in New Orleans. Monitors were mounted in the bar to display faces and pets of viewers from home via their early webcams. It went well, but it was a one off.

Tulane was probably not the best incubator for developing a business plan, Especially a business plan in a new technology space. Outside of New York, Boston, and California, back in those days most schools were in the business grooming the next cohort of worker bees. Bluecollar trade classes in high school or College Prep were the two tracks in high school. The college prep worker bees from Tulane would probably end up mirroring the characters in Frasier as their paradigm and image of “Success”.

One kid I knew had a poster in the living of “Success”, a poster of a huge mansion with 4 car garage with Lambos, Mercedes, and Porsches peeking out of the garage doors. Ah the hang over from the 80s, shaping and informing our Goals. Goals are good, right? Definitely better than not having Goals.

No wonder I didn't devote a lot of time to passing the CPA exam. My actual degree was accounting and finance, which yielded.. umm sporadic employment and hourly contract jobs, jobs I was not remotely interested in, and the pay was terrible anyway. 1993 was not the best year to graduate. Only kids with the best GPA’s had any hope of being hired. Everyone else, 3.5 and below, moved back home to the ‘rents in New Jersey, or waiting tables in the Quarter with a business degree.

In those days, Tulane wasn't much for career placement or counseling. It was fun place to be in college, but unless you went to engineering, law, public health or medicine, good luck on your job search.

All the new technology at the time, just seemed common place to me. If a kid in college waiting tables could afford all this gearz why couldn't anyone else? I just assumed someone had already ran with it, never seeing the bubble I resided within. Remember, we didn't have a robust Internet to see if the idea was out there already, but making the assumption it was already done seemed reasonable, at least to me, and with the resources I had access to, or didn't have access to. If you missed it in the paper, chances you wouldn't stumble across while spelunking library microfiche for your term paper.

Without any mentors guidance, without access to a community of Makers, and generally in New Orleans, exposed to students who were being told to get a job, not to develop ideas into transformational businesses, I simply hobbied all these ideas, and took them nowhere.

Best advice, don't be that guy.

Don't be me.

Find and cultivate Good Mentors. Don't let them whither, wander, and drift. Assert yourself and grab their advice and guidance like your life depends on it. Literally, your success depends on it, so quite possibly your life, quality of life, depends on it.

If you have dysfunctional, unsupportive family members, don't devote more than the basic amount of time at Holidays to them. They will keep your mind in the wrong place, and you will end up holding yourself back by adopting their habits and beliefs You just spent 4 years away from them, Don't Go Back Home. Go wherever there exists a community of people with similar ideas and passions. Move there. Sleep on a couch, wait tables to pay for it, beg, borrow to be there. Don't move back home. Visit briefly and then on Holidays.

As to your ideas- Don't assume they have been done.

If you assume anything, assume your idea is new, better, different, unique, and at least competitive to whatever it is already out there that's in the same space.