The World Is Changing

It looks like the stuck astronauts are coming home.

Not that they were ever really "stuck." At least, not in the way the media made it out - which was as if they would be left to die in space.

Back in June, I said they would get home in an Uber instead of their Starliner.

Yesterday, NASA announced that SpaceX will provide the Uber.

Growing up with the Space Shuttle program, it was unfathomable to think that a private company would ever manufacture a vehicle capable of carrying humans back and forth to space.

Fast forward to 2025, and we'll have a private company - SpaceX - retrieving two humans from the Space Station because the inferior vehicle produced by a legacy company - Boeing - at nearly double the cost (and $1.5B over budget) isn't safe to fly.

Crazy times.

Not just for space travel.

Everything.

The world is changing at warp speed, and most people are either not paying attention or cannot comprehend the speed at which it's happening.

Especially parents.

In retrospect, I had no business being in college when I was 18. I went in as a child, spent five years socializing, and came out as a child with a degree that qualified me to do a job I quickly learned I hated.

My older boys didn't go to college.

Good.

Neither is cut out for that path; it would have been a waste of money. But, like so many parents, they don't understand how fast the world is changing, so they have not taken advantage of the changes that would allow them to build the lives they want.

They haven't read the hundreds of books available to them about things they are interested in.

They haven't taken advantage of the enormous amount of cheap and free education on the Internet.

Instead, they're floundering.

But the truth is, I'd rather see them flounder in the real world than flounder on a college campus where they tell you that everything will be OK if you just get that degree. Meanwhile, many with a said degree are waiting tables because the underemployment rate for college grads is as high as 70% for some degrees.

My girls are college-bound in two more years. No surprise - the schools are still pushing the "you can't succeed without a degree" bullshit despite the $1.7 TRILLION in debt that students aren't earning enough to pay.

Meanwhile, one of my mentors, six years my junior, lacks a marketing degree and owns a self-taught and self-made 7-figure marketing company.

Go figure.

Right now, the girls have some idea of what they want to do, but I look back to when I graduated and see that I had no clue about how the world worked or what I wanted to do.

And 18-year-old kids today are babies compared to 18-year-olds from my generation - they don't know shit from Shinola.

So I've told them both they won't get a dime from me for college unless they take at least one gap year to get away from the education system and see what the world is really about.

Like Big Pharma and Big Food, Big Education is a real thing, and it's not looking out for us.

My youngest, who'll be 13 in a month, recently told me it seemed to him that there are better ways to learn than going to college.

Winner-winner, chicken dinner.

There's no doubt that for some, the four-year degree will lead to success.

It remains a requirement for those who want to be doctors, nurses, or engineers. But even that is changing. When I graduated, you needed a degree to be a computer programmer, but that's no longer the case.

For most future graduates, their degrees will likely turn out like Boeing's Starliner.

It might fly, but it won't be particularly useful, and the people who do it the new way will find a lot more success.