I just wanna remind everyone that while you chase greater and greater things in your life, don’t forget to ask yourself all the time “am I happy?”
A lot of times we chase things without really trying to understand whether it is what we truly want to do. We may end up very successful but empty inside. Or we may not end up successful at all, and feel that we didn’t become the person we think we deserve to be.
I write this more to remind the highest achievers, that just because you do very well in school doesn’t mean that you should feel the need to make as much money as possible. It also doesn’t necessarily mean you have what it takes to make a lot of money.
A lot of very highly qualified people in Singapore are working middle-class jobs because of absolutely idiosyncratic reasons. It could also be because they suck in the real world.
I have met very educated people who were perfectly happy pursuing a simple job with less pay than they could have gotten, because either the job is something they love doing and therefore better at, or their job allowed them to do other things that may not pay at all but are nevertheless valuable.
Not everyone who did very well in school find joy pursuing careers that pay a lot of money. Not everyone who did very well in school have the competence and characteristics to do equally well at any job. Even if the stars align, doing well in school doesn’t even remotely measure your management skills.
Which means even if you have the most prestigious degrees, you may find yourself stuck in middle-management because you just do very low-value stuff very well, or you do high-level technical stuff very well but nobody is paying you for that talent.
Also, not everyone who did very poorly in school wouldn’t one day find something to do that would pay them a lot more than a Harvard student. As an exercise, I’m sure you know of Singaporeans who are immensely wealthy who didn’t have much schooling. Sheng Siong, BreadTalk, Hotel 81, HaiDiLao etc. These are all very idiosyncratic as I said.
So by all means do well in school, but also know that to make a lot of money requires a special sauce that your professors wouldn’t know of. Very few people would know what it takes. And also, quit obsessing over making tons and tons of money and obsess over doing something you absolutely love.
You will never do very well in the things you don’t enjoy doing anyway. So pursuing a career because it pays more, not because you are interested and passionate about it, may not even be the most optimal decision. i.e You may actually end up making a lot less.