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What careers did you imagine for yourself when you were in grad school?

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When I was little, my mom said,

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"John K!"

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(My dad was Big John, I was John K.)

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"You'll make a great engineer."

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And so, for a long time, I was like,

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"Yeah, I'll make a great engineer."

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Sometimes I forgot what that word was

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and I'd say, "Oh, my mom believes in me,

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I'll be something great."

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But I really didn't know what an engineer was,

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and I never really got the memo

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of how to become an engineer.

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I didn't know any engineers.

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My mom and dad were both lawyers,

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everyone they knew were lawyers,

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I didn't know what an engineer was.

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Turns out my uncle actually was an engineer,

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I've learned,

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but he lived in Schenectady,

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which I didn't know where that was.

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I didn't spend much time with him.

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So, I went to high school and I graduated.

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I went to college and I graduated.

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But instead of diving into grad school,

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I just started being an entrepreneur.

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I went into education

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with all these other teachers

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and all these other clinicians

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and all these other MSWs, social workers.

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But I wasn't a clinician,

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I wasn't a teacher,

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I was an entrepreneur,

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and I wanted to change the next generation of schools,

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and I realized that by being a little different

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than the community,

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that was sort of my grad school.

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And so, I worked hard,

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I started an organization,

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I've grown it.

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You know, there are 500 people,

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$35 million operating budget,

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8 U.S. states.

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I still didn't go to graduate school.

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My graduate school was running an organization.

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And then in 2008, when I was an old man,

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I went to graduate school.

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I got a fellowship.

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I became an officer of an elite university,

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Harvard University,

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and I got to take courses

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in every single graduate school.

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I took seven classes at Harvard Business School,

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six classes at the Graduate School of Design,

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a class at the School of Public Health.

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I went and lived in Favelas in Mexico.

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So, I could have gone and got an MBA

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right out of college,

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but I would have been a dime a dozen.

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Instead, I was one of ten mid-careers

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at this great university,

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and I was seen as an asset,

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not just this, a lost leader,

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because the graduate school needed money

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to pay for the graduate students.

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So, if I were to give some advice on career stuff,

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don't just dive into graduate school to get a credential

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because you don't know what you want to do.

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My brother got a perfect score on the LSATs

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but took a year off going to law school

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because he didn't know why

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he wanted to go to law school.

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So, I just dove into education,

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built something really special.

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In doing so, I built up a network

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that was pretty freaking tremendous.

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And I think in the next generation,

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folks should think about

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how they can be a connector of people

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from different places.

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And graduate school,

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you can go there and build a network,

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but build your social graph by activities

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and by your reputation

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and by collaborating.

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And graduate school can get in the way of that.

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