Tuesday Post: School and Success

Read time: ~2.35 minutes

Happy Tuesday!

Every Tuesday I'd like to offer strategies for the week ahead and a thought to fuel your action.

Traditional schooling hinders our ability to reach professional success.

School teaches structure, memorization, and rule-following.

It rewards predictability, not adaptability. Success is measured in grades, not growth. Failure is punished rather than seen as an essential part of learning.

And then, after years of conditioning, we enter the real world—where failure teaches the most, progress is nonlinear, and success is about iteration, not perfection.

That’s where the misalignment begins.

I always knew the path to success.

Study hard, get good grades, and follow the plan, and you’ll get where you want to go.

I believed in it—until the day it didn’t work.

I remember opening my computer to check my email to see the early admissions results. I looked through the inbox for the email from the University of Georgia. I found it.

With my heart racing, I double-clicked the email to see my fate. Eighteen years, 13 in school, boiled down to this moment.

Rejection.

I had done everything right—good grades, strong test scores, extracurriculars—but the results didn’t match the effort.

I sat in silence in front of the computer. Frustration, sadness, uncertainty. All of it could be felt inside me. I had spent years believing that success would follow if I just followed the system.

But at that moment, I felt something shift.

Maybe the system wasn’t built to guarantee success.

Perhaps it was just a filter, and I had spent my entire life optimizing for the wrong thing.

School tells us success is linear. But real-world progress is anything but.

School tells us failure is bad. But in the real world, failure teaches more than any textbook ever could.

School tells us structure creates success. But in life, you have to build the structure yourself.

It’s as if the education system trains students on rotary phones and then drops them into a world of iPhones.

And yet, we wonder why so many people feel lost when they enter the workforce.

If school conditions us to fear failure, seek structure, and expect linear progress, how do we undo it? It starts with self-awareness.

Recognizing that the skills that made you successful in school aren’t the same ones that create success in the real world.

And then, experimenting.

Taking risks. Building adaptability instead of waiting for certainty. Seeing failure as data, not defeat.

Success isn’t about following a pre-set map; it’s about using a compass and learning how to navigate as you go.

School rewards knowledge. Life rewards action. More knowledge, more planning, and more perfection don’t create success.

Success comes from adaptability, iteration, and the willingness to start before you feel ready.

The best is ahead!

-Matt