Why do some brilliant students suck at making money?

Recently I wrote a piece which generated a lot of debate and that's a sign that I have chanced upon an interesting topic that you guys care passionately about. I get disappointed when I write a piece (like this one about gambling) and get no comments, conversely I get so excited when I see you guys commenting and responding to one of my pieces. This is a follow up to the story of the old friend I tried to help but really misjudged the situation, my bad.  Part of the reason I really wanted to help this friend was because I thought he got a bad deal: he seemed to have done everything that was expected of him as a Singaporean student - he studied hard, went to all the right schools, had great results, graduated from NUS with an impressive degree. Yet somehow, he struggled to thrive in the working world and isn't making much money as an adult, despite having been nothing less than an excellent student. His story isn't unique and perhaps it is more a sign of how the education system is rather inadequate in preparing students for the real world and to be fair, I have met people in the UK who have found themselves in a very similar situation, so it is not a uniquely Singaporean problem. I am going to talk about this tricky issue on why some good students end up struggling in the working world.

Why do some bright graduates struggle to earn much money?

1. Don't sacrifice too much for your degree

Too many young people think that simply getting into a good university guarantees them a good job and nothing could be further from the truth: many students are so focused on trying to get the best possible grades they sacrifice all other aspects of their lives in order to spend more time studying. This is a double-edged sword - whilst better grades are important, much of what you learn is going to be completely irrelevant to your future job anyway, so that time can be a lot better spent actually developing skills that can help you get a job. In an ideal world, the students would be able to cope reasonably well with their school work, leaving them enough time to do other useful and interesting things to develop those skills that will be directly relevant to their future jobs. But if the students are unable to cope without extra help like external tuition or simply dedicating every waking hour to studying in that desperate quest to get straight As, then that leaves them with no time to do develop any other useful skills - people who find themselves in this situation often convince themselves that they are doing the right thing in a society which does discriminate against those who do not have a good degree. Whilst there is an element of truth to that, there's no running away from the fact that you cannot expect anyone to hire you simply on the basis of your degree. Employers are expecting a lot more from the candidate.

We are stuck in a difficult situation with no simple solutions: let's take the example of my nephew who fits the description above. He is a pretty average student from a neighbourhood secondary school and right now, he's studying extremely hard with a lot of tuition to try to get him into a decent junior college after his O levels. If I had my way, I would cancel all his tuition or reduce it to the bare minimum to allow him to dedicate for more time to activities that have nothing to do with the subjects he is studying at school. I would enroll him in all kinds of activities where he has to put his phone and books down, get out there and mingle with loads of people for there is much to be learnt simply through human interaction. I would make sure he gets to interact with a lot of people, far and beyond his classmates at school, as that would open his eyes to the vast array of possibilities of career options, making him see the long term prospects rather than focusing on the next test or exam. Would his grades suffer? Of course they would. Would there be consequences? Yes there will be, he probably wouldn't make it into a JC without tuition and probably not make it into a decent university/ This would horrify my family of course, but let's not pretend that there is a choice here: if he does scrape by and get into a half-decent course at a local university by the skin of his teeth, then he's still no better off getting a job without having spent any time developing those useful skills outside work when he has to eventually compete with others for the good jobs out there.

So which option is better? Is he better off with a decent degree but with virtually no other skills beyond that degree? Or shall we roll the dice and sacrifice that degree and see if he can start looking for far more interesting options for a career - getting a huge head start on his peers who are going to be buried in homework and tuition for the foreseeable future? Bear in mind the former isn't exactly an attractive option when those who have already have a good degree are struggling to find decent work and are by no means guaranteed success. So, we are left with the situation that can be summarized like this: imagine if we present a 15 year old child with two choices for a meal. In one plate, we have a few slices of bread which are not fresh, in fact some of it has gone mouldy and you would need to be careful to tear off the bits of bread which have already gone off - even after that it would hardly be a nice meal. Or on the other hand, you have a mystery box: it could be the best meal you have ever had in your life, but it could be a stack of bread that is even a lot more mouldy and rotten or even nothing. Now, how likely you are going to go for the mystery box will depend on how pleasant the first option is: if it is a decent looking sandwich, then why would you want to gamble and take a risk with an unknown? But if the stack of bread looks really quite mouldy and disgusting, then you will realize that you have little to lose by rolling the dice and gambling for a much better option. However, the risk-averse nature of Singaporeans is making a lot of them accepting a stack of increasing mouldy-looking bread even if they dream of a much brighter future.

2. Barking up the wrong tree 

Another common reason as to why so many seemingly brilliant students struggle in their working lives is because they have barked up the wrong tree with their careers, that means they have totally chosen the wrong career path. The story is one I am sure you are familiar with: bright Asian students does the degree and pursues a career that has been chosen for them by their parents. Everything has been decided for them by their parents but the desires of the students have been ignored - they end up in a career they really dislike and end up struggling. It is one thing to simply study and pass exams, but to have to wake up every morning to go do a job you truly hate is another matter altogether. The opposite could happen of course (there's more than one way to bark up the wrong tree) - you could be totally passionate about what you do but suck at it. I knew of this rich kid Maggie (not her real name) who thought it would be really cool to have her own Youtube channel to teach people how to do make up properly, now this is a really crowded market and if you were to go to Youtube and search for make up tutorials, there are thousands of them. Maggie spent hundreds, even thousands of dollars on each of her Youtube videos, yet she never broke even as you need a lot of hits on Youtube and other sponsors before you can start making money as a Youtuber - well, she never quite got enough hits even if her videos did look reasonably professional yet because her parents were fairly rich, nobody told her that she was barking up the wrong tree trying to make money this way. Sure Maggie was having a lot of fun and her videos look great, but is she even making a dollar from her Youtube videos? No, she is running them at a massive loss. She's not stupid, you could even say she's talented (her video tutorials are outstanding), but goodness me she's certainly barking up the wrong tree.

3. Hobby vs career

Sometimes parents do point us in the wrong direction, not because they have any malicious intent to fuck us up, but simply out of sheer stupidity. Let me give you an example: modesty aside, I am a rather good cook. That's not rocket science at the end of the day, I like looking up interesting recipes on the internet and creating delicious meals. It's hard to go badly wrong when you're simply following a recipe - it is an activity I enjoy. So when my family came to visit me in London, I made an effort to cook some really nice meals for them. When my mother tasted my cooking, she was so impressed that she said, "you can open your own restaurant with food like that." I'm sure she meant it as a compliment but I pointed out to her how difficult it is to survive in the restaurant trade, it takes a lot more than a good chef to make a restaurant profitable but it is far more about running a business. McDonald's is a great example of a hugely profitable company in this category, but is their food the best (or even good)? Rather their success is based on their excellent business model. Heck, my favourite Chinese restaurant in London closed down last year and the food was excellent - serving authentic Hong Kong style cuisine wasn't enough to keep them in business. Sometimes you just have to recognize that there are activities that you have to enjoy as hobbies rather than try to carve a career from them because of just how hard it is to make money from that activity. This means taking a very practical approach to choosing a career you may not be exactly passionate about but at least it will make you enough money to do all the activities you enjoy.

One of the activities I truly enjoy is gymnastics - I am a former national champion gymnast, have all my coaching qualifications and speak several languages. I could easily become a full time gymnastics coach to pursue an activity I truly enjoy as my career however, the money is pretty pathetic. I make a lot more in a month than what gymnastics coaches typically make in a year and I work far less hours a week. The kind of job satisfaction that gymnastics coaches get is not monetary - I know plenty of gymnastics coaches and they probably don't have the qualifications to do any other jobs. But this doesn't change the fact that they are good gymnastics coaches, of course: but here's a sobering fact. This gymnastics coach I know finally managed to get on the property ladder in her late 30s, I didn't know what to say or how to react. Her new place was a tiny flat in a suburb far away from the gymnastics club where she worked as that was the only place she could afford and she would probably spend the rest of her life trying to pay off that mortgage on what she earned as a gymnastics coach. Don't get me wrong, she is a good gymnastics coach - in fact, she taught me how to do one of my favourite combinations as an adult in my late 30s, it was a combination that I couldn't do when I was much younger and fitter, but with her instruction I was able to learn it at my advanced years - that's how good she is. It just so happens that unless you happen to be say the head coach in one of America's top gymnastics clubs, most gymnastics coaches are usually poorly paid. Therefore I work in corporate finance and just treat gymnastics as a hobby these days.

4. Lack of soft skills

Another problem faced by many young people is the complete lack of soft skills - so let me explain how this problem manifests itself. Whenever a company advertises for a new position, they will receive hundreds of applicants if it is a really good job. So how do you go from starting in that big stack of very credible applicants, all of whom have great results, good degrees from respectable universities to being that one candidate who is ultimately selected for the role? There is then the long, rigorous testing and selection process for the candidates who make the shortlist of credible candidates - simply looking good on paper would not get you the job, it may only get you as far as making the interview process. If you lack the kind of soft skills necessary to perform well in an interview process, then you simply won't get the job if you perform badly at this stage. I have written a whole piece dedicated to atrocious interview disasters in an earlier post. Many people who lack soft skills also lack the awareness of just where they are going wrong - they often go back to the point that they have brilliant results from university, they were excellent students, but they fail to consider what the companies are looking for: the companies are looking for someone who can actually join the team and do the work, add value to the company. It is their refusal to acknowledge that there is even a problem that makes them unemployable.

So there are these young people who look good on paper, but keep failing at the interview stage. Now some candidates who find themselves in this situation actually do ask for help and manage to fix this problem is but others may never actually figure this out. The irony is that these are not stupid people - they have probably managed to pass the most difficult exams at some of the world's top university, but they lack the awareness to actually critically analyze their own faults. Talk about being oblivious: but they were told all their lives that as long as they get straight As at school, nothing else matters. As covered in a recent post, you'll be amazed how some people are extremely reluctant to ask for help and will even reject help when it is offered to them on a silver plate. At this point, it is no longer a question of intelligence per se as we are dealing with some very intelligent people with a glaringly huge blind spot that somehow, they just cannot see. Eventually we start to see a pattern emerge: that's when gatekeepers realize there has got to be a reason why someone who is seemingly bright is simply unable to secure a good job and they get sucked into a cycle of under-employment and short term contracts. After all, do we want to hire someone who will be potentially difficult to work with? Maybe if you are a very niche specialist in your field, then people have no choice but to work with you if you're the only person who can do the job; but if you're a fresh graduate trying to get your first job, then you just don't have that luxury.

5. Listening to the wrong people 

Again, this is a topic that I have covered before on my blog. There was a case of a young lady who was clueless about her future career prospects and had a harsh interview where the interviewer put her down and gave her a hard time. So she posted a message on her Facebook wall and all her young friends (who are equally clueless) piled in and posted really encouraging remarks in a bid to make her feel better about the situation. Don't get me wrong, I am glad this young lady has good friends who are supportive of her, but did it occur to them that perhaps the interviewer had a valid point? Did it occur to them that they should ask their friend to perhaps seek better advice from highly qualified and experienced professionals who know what they are talking about? No, it was full of vapid nonsense like, "believe in yourself, you can do it, if you work hard you can make your dreams come true." I did worry that if this young lady listened to her kind (but clueless) friends, she would have been misled into believing that she is doing nothing wrong and continue wasting her time going down the wrong path. Once again, are her friends malicious trying to fuck her up? Hell no, they have nothing but noble intentions, they were merely trying to say something nice to cheer her up, they realized our young lady had a difficult interview and they were merely trying to reassure her - but is the message they are sending her helpful? No, at best, it is somewhat unhelpful, at worst it is downright misleading. Are they aware of this? Probably not - that's why it is so important to make sure you are critical of everything you hear, even from people who are your very best friends. 

I can't stress this enough, it is virtually impossible for young people to figure out their career paths without some help. At least in this day and age, they have Google which is a good start, but no substitute for a mentor who is willing to invest some time and energy into giving the young person some bespoke career advice. Recently, when I found out that my nephew wanted to become a maths teacher, my first reaction was, "hell no, what a stupid idea, somebody tell him that he should not even contemplate that career path, that's such a wrong career choice for him for so many reasons." Yet nobody in my family, not my siblings, not my parents, nobody tried to even engage him in a conversation about it and so he was left to make up his own mind without much (or any) help from the adults in his life. In their defence, my family protested that it was perhaps too early for my nephew at the age of 15 to decide on a career path and that he might change his mind in the future - they didn't want to discourage him by saying negative things like, "are you insane, you will make a terrible teacher, you can't do this, you don't have the skills to do this job", they wanted to be optimistic and open-minded whilst letting him decide what he wants to do for himself in due course. Of course, I recognize that there is some merit to that argument, but at what stage do you intervene, when it becomes obvious that he has made a terrible choice?

Who should become maths teachers?

6. Changing the mindset of the working class

This is perhaps the biggest struggle in the challenge of social mobility - it is possible to get students from the poorest, most deprived families to score well in exams if they are inherently intelligent and then all you need to do is to pour some money into a scheme to help them and we have seen plenty of schemes like that all over the world to help students from deprived backgrounds. What you are up against however, is the mindset of such people when they finish their education and try to get a job - it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to get out there and say, "Call the search off, I'm the best person for the job." If you're from a working class family, if you grew up watching your parents working extremely hard to barely make ends meet, if you don't personally know any other rich people who have become extremely successful, then it is actually incredibly hard to project that degree of confidence in your working life. There will be that lingering doubt of "what makes you think you are the one who is going to succeed when so many others like me have failed". You see, studying to pass an exam is something you can do in isolation without having to face the competition. If you have a nice teacher who is very supporting, then the only people you have to face are all friendly and on your side. That is why it is so important for kids to do a sport like Judo or Karate, where they have to look their opponents in the eye just before the start of the fight an think, "I will destroy you, I am not afraid of you. I am going to win." If you show any fear at that stage, then you may as well surrender - how many young people from deprived, working class background can actually develop that kind of super killer instinct that will serve them well in the highly competition job market they are about to enter?

I have worked in sales which is one of the most competitive, high-stress environments; it was a horrifically nasty place to work, but it did give me some of the best training I needed for my career. It was a kill-or-be-killed environment, kinda like the Hunger Games of the corporate world. The only rule was to make sure that your sales figures were impressive as there was always someone more hungry, more determined ready to take your place and steal the deals that you were working on from you. My friend George once used these words to describe this woman we worked with, "you need to watch yourself with this snake of a woman, she is so devious she will knock out your teeth just to steal the food you're currently chewing before you have had the chance to swallow it." Some people just don't have what it takes to thrive in this kind of hostile environment which is highly competitive, so they settle for typical working class jobs where there isn't any element of competition, such as working in a production line in a factory, where you simply follow instructions, you do as you are told, you're not really challenged at work and sure you get paid for your efforts - however, such people end up earning very little money and that's the price they have to pay for avoiding a highly competitive environment. Of course, being competitive and aggressive doesn't guarantee you success in the business world today, but by the same token, you will never succeed by being very passive and risk-averse when you're up against the very best in the working world.

7. Understanding the concept of 'creating value' 

Let's look at the concept of having a job from the very practical perspective of creating value: if a waiter is hired by a restaurant and paid $2,000 a month for his work, then we can assume that the waiter is generating at least $2,000 of value to the business through his work in serving the customers. A good waiter can increase revenue for the restaurant by interacting with the customers, encouraging them to spend more money on the more expensive items like wine or coming back to try other dishes they haven't ordered that time. Therefore good restaurants can rely on repeat business from regular customers and if a waiter can actively contribute to that. But conversely, if a waiter is so bad at his job (for example, he is very rude with customers) that it results in poor reviews online, then the waiter is probably not generating enough revenue to justify the salary he is paid and he will probably lose his job. If students have worked part time during their studies, then they will probably have learnt this lesson the hard way because the kind of part time work that students end up doing is usually very lowly paid and most of the time, they do it just for the work experience rather than for the money. This is when they realize that despite the fact that they may be doing very well at their studies, they are worth so very little to the company they are working for because they simply are not capable of 'creating value' yet.

Some careers are extremely lucrative of course because of the high price that people pay for those services: take plastic surgeons for example. We can put a price on the value they create because we know how much people are willing to pay top plastic surgeons for their skills and expertise. So if you are a highly skilled plastic surgeon, a plastic surgery clinic will gladly hire you and give you a huge salary because they know how much they can charge their clients for your services. But what about graduates with degrees from the arts & social sciences or the pure sciences, or worse still something like philosophy, media studies or business studies degrees that don't point them in any particular direction. They are badly placed to simply step into a career where they can immediately justify creating value for their employers. Of course, I had one of those useless degrees as well - my degree was in geography but I was able to to recognize the stupidity of my mistake soon enough and started a career in sales, mostly relying on the fact that I spoke several languages and I realized quickly that's how I can easily add value to the company I work for. One mistake that some people make is that they think they have to stick to the path they have chosen, "I studied geography at university, I have a degree in geography therefore I must find a career to do with geography!" Oh no, you can't be that stubborn in life - you have to adapt to the situations you find yourself in, be ready to change courses and most importantly, be willing to look yourself in the mirror and say, "I made a mistake, I accept total responsibility but I am now going to do whatever it takes fix things." 

8. Giving up and feeling like a victim

This is a very dangerous pitfall that many people are totally oblivious to. Yes I can sympathize when young people have been totally misled by their parents and teachers into believing that somehow they would be rewarded with a well-paid job if they simply studied hard and got that degree from a top university. But on the other hand, no amount of anger, resentment or bitterness can resolve the situation when you realize that something has clearly gone wrong and you are unable to get that golden job you thought you were going to get. Some people are very practical and are prepared to do whatever it takes to fix the situation, so they can make things right and move on with life. Others give in to negativity and victimhood - they start blaming everyone from their parents to the schools to the governments to society to any scapegoat you can possibly think of for their predicament. Now the problem with behaving like a victim is that you start pointing fingers at everyone but yourself: that stops you from trying to help yourself when you convince yourself that you have done absolutely nothing wrong and it is always someone else who needs to rectify the situation for you. This is a vicious cycle that can paralyze someone into action, if you tried to tell them that they should start helping themselves, they usually react by protesting, "but this is not my fault, I am innocent! I have done nothing wrong, why should it be me who has to fix this problem? Why are you so cruel, why can't you understand what I have been forced to go through?"

And in case you didn't get the memo, life is inherently unfair - very, very unfair indeed. There's really little we can do about this unfairness, this injustice that we encounter apart; I tend to just shrug my shoulders and accept that there's nothing I can do about it. Note that this is not the same as condoning or even approving it, but I resign myself to the fact that the less time I waste worrying about this state of unfairness, the sooner I can start helping myself resolve my problems. All you have to do is to look at some of the problems facing the world right now, like where do I even begin? There is so much negativity online these days. From corrupt governments to income inequality to problems to do with social mobility to dishonest, greedy politicians to the amount of hate spewed by activists groups each time there's a referendum or an election, if you're one of those people who spends too much time on the internet and not enough time being surrounded by supportive friends and loving family members who care for you, then it is all too easy to fall prey to this kind of thinking: where everything is wrong because it is someone else's fault and nobody is on your side. That's a very flawed way of thinking because even if you've not really done anything wrong and had been totally obedient,you are still nonetheless a victim of circumstances, but giving in to the mindset of being the blameless victim isn't going to get you out of this mess. Sometimes, we just have to put up with the inherent injustice that we have suffered and get on with life - even if no one else will help you, then you had better start helping yourself quickly rather than feeling sorry for yourself.

I shall finish by reflecting on my peers who went to VJC with me back in the years 1993 and 1994. Despite the fact that we were all undoubtedly smart students who made it to a good school, there is a pretty wide range when you look at how much this cohort have achieved. On one end, you have CEOs of successful companies who have made millions and on the other hand, there are housewives who never had a career and have very humble, modest lifestyles in the heartlands. So that's it from me on this issue. So over to you, what do you think? Have you met people who were brilliant at school but somehow failed to establish a career? What is the correlation between being a good student and making loads of money? What other factors are far more important when it comes to making money apart from the skills needed to be a good student? And were you a hardworking, good student when you were at school? What are the most useful skills you need to do your job today? Please let me know what you think, do leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.