Why I Got a College Degree (and a Flamethrower)

So you’re probably wondering why I have a flamethrower and what it has to do with college. Let me explain.

I recently completed my bachelors’ degree, and to celebrate we had a party at our house. My friends went together and bought me a flamethrower. I’ve always wanted one (you can see it in my latest YouTube video)!

But the larger question is: Why did I take so much time and money to go to college? Why does college matter?

The key takeaway for me is to always be learning. The mind is the one thing you can always be improving and adding to. That’s why I’m always reading and learning new ideas (for example, reading a 100 books last year). College, for me, was simply the latest iteration of that process. You don’t have to go to college (though I encourage it if you want), but I do believe everyone should make a habit of continual learning and growing their minds in a profitable way.

In a way, I like to think of the brain as a computer, and ideas and what you know are the “software” that’s running on your computer’s “hardware.” (I know, it's a bit of a terrible analogy, but stick with me here). Every day, the “software” in your head is being put to the test. What ideas are driving your actions? What facts do you have in your brain, and how do they effect your view the world? For me, I can’t really think of anything more important than giving my brain as many tools as possible (or, so to speak, the best “software” I can find). In order to do that, I need to be disciplined to keep pushing my mind to learn more and have as complete a worldview as I can. Of course, there’s no way I’ll ever complete that journey since there’s so much information out there. But I believe that developing my mind to think well and to learn about how the world works is one of the most important things I can do.

Because of all this, college felt like the right next move. There’s many different ways to learn new material, but college inherently forced me to get much more focused in my studies, and also required that I process through what I was learning by being able to articulate the information in formal writing and discussion with my teachers and classmates. Sure, I probably could find much of the same material somewhere on the internet (if I spent a lot of time tracking it down), but there’s something powerful about the structure and the mental discipline to complete the task. Learning to discipline and fully apply the mind to a single task until it is understood (or at least completed) is a very important skill in life. I knew I needed to be better at that, and I knew college would help. It certainly did, too!

The main takeaway is simply to make a deliberate effort to learn something new every day. Take the time to keep developing your mind; it takes work and time, but you will not regret it.