The Preparation

A guinea pig carves his path.

Atlanta, GA

December 15, 2024

This week I cleared another birthday. With each solar circumnavigation, standing up takes longer, bedtime inches earlier, and loud music inclines me more to call the cops than join the party.

But age also encrusts attitudes and hardens habits, trapping us in deepening ruts of weary routine. We carve these grooves thru the course of our lives, often in orchestrated trails we’re supposed to take.

Over time, we expect everyone else to follow them too. Without thinking, most of us do.

For several generations, the recommended road has been heavily choreographed: Finish high school, go to college, find a job, get married, buy (i.e., mortgage) a home, have kids, raise them to follow the prescribed path, and retire to Florida after forty years racing rats.

But in recent decades, the conventional career track can seem like quicksand, leaving many modern graduates feeling stuck in the mud.

That isn’t their fault.

Unfair Criticism

Like any generation, the latest crop has its foibles and flaws. But criticism they receive is often unfair.

They were born after the wave of post-war prosperity began to break. Today’s college-age students weren’t alive on 9/11. No high schooler remembers the Great Recession.

Diluted dollars, incessant spending, relentless regulation, and collapsing quality have pulverized purchasing power of most Americans. Those who own the least are hit hardest. That includes most young adults.

They don’t bear responsibility for this. Yet they bear the brunt of the burden. But the victims are finally getting wise to the racket.

As they wander into the world, many of them sense they’ve been led astray. Those who stripped the mine gave them the shaft… and now tell them to stop whining as their ladder to liberty is lifted away.

Not whining is good advice as far as it goes. But more high school graduates are following it while going their own way.

The Guinea Pig

They’re beginning to realize college isn’t for everyone, or even for most.

In certain situations, higher education makes sense. I went that route. So did our sons. One graduated and the other’s almost halfway there.

Yet many students are misallocating time and resources, accumulating debt to waste four years. Last Fall, I learned of a remarkable young man who shunned university for an unconventional route.

It wasn’t merely the road less travelled by. It was one that didn’t exist.

How could it? The path is personal. Anyone taking it must clear it himself. That’s the point. The main obstacle is having the guts to grab a machete.

Maxim Smith did.

His father is Matt Smith, a serial entrepreneur and brilliant thinker with whom I briefly contributed some essays for Doug Casey last winter.

Casey is renowned internationally as (among countless other accomplishments) a philosopher, author, and speculator. For years, he’s contemplated “a radical alternative to college”.

He envisioned compiling his ideas into a book (which he, Matt, and Maxim are finalizing now). Other priorities intervened, and the project languished…until Maxim graduated high school.

Not being interested in college, Maxim sought other options… and decided to try Casey’s approach. Like Donald Trump’s healthcare proposal, it was more a “concept” than a “plan.”

But Maxim decided to give it a shot, and make it his own. He’d be the guinea pig for what Casey calls The Preparation.

The Count of Monte Cristo

When Matt told me what his son was doing, I was intrigued. With his permission, I called Maxim (as it happens, one year ago today), and was instantly impressed. This eighteen year-old was mature, intentional, curious, and disciplined.

We spoke more than an hour as I delved into what he was doing. He admitted he wasn’t quite sure. But the gist was he’d learn what he could to be ready for anything. He told me his model was the Count of Monte Cristo.

After years wrongly imprisoned in the Château d'If, Edmund Dantès met a learned priest who accidentally tunneled into his cell. The Abbé helped Dantès use his prison time wisely, instilling knowledge and skills to make his protégé “confident, competent, and dangerous.”

This trilogy of attributes comes not from Alexandre Dumas, but from Matt Smith.

The notions of confidence and competence seem self-evident. But “dangerous” might take some people aback. It shouldn’t.

Matt describes it not only as the ability to defend oneself, but to think for oneself…to critically assess and question any information received - particularly what we’re told to believe, and especially what we already do.

Three Lists

Maxim started his quest a few months before our call, with a list Doug Casey provided. On it were groups of games (e.g., chess, poker, bridge), activities (foreign languages, musical instruments, martial arts, husbandry, etc.), and occupational skills (sales, entrepreneurship, economics, speaking, writing) with which any well-rounded man should be adept.

He’d already begun expanding his knowledge and acquiring skills. His father owns a ranch in Uruguay, which afforded opportunities to learn horse riding, cattle rustling, fence-building, and erecting a greenhouse.

He also scheduled time each day to lift weights, play chess, read books, write essays, or study the lives of great men. He made me feel like a lazy bum.

My small contribution was recommending the Michel Thomas Spanish courses, which Maxim repeatedly (and graciously) acknowledged in his outstanding Substack.

Maxim initially published his progress to hold himself accountable. But as he accumulated subscribers, responsibility to fulfill his obligation to readers compelled him to post on a regular schedule. By doing so consistently, he’s developed what obviously was an innate talent.

The Preparation is less about setting goals (which can be unintentionally constrained by our limited imaginations) than by identifying traits of the man we want to become, and cultivating the character and capabilities that person would possess.

The Most Important Verbs

The idea is to give young men broad exposure and experience so they understand how the world works, to help make them into what Matt Smith calls “expert generalists.”

Doug Casey observes that in any language, the most important verbs are “be”, “do”, and “have”. But our culture prioritizes them in the wrong order.

We tend to over-emphasize the “have”. But, as Matt put it, this is the least important consideration. If anything, what we have is simply a symptom of how we approach the other two verbs.

A common question most high school graduates get is “what do you want to do?”

But, as Matt said in this interview (he discusses “Be, Do, Have” after the 0:55 mark), that’s the wrong question. The right one wonders what young man wants to be.

Yet that’s rarely asked. Only when it’s answered can anyone identify the character, skills, and knowledge his mental mentor would possess, and develop a plan to acquire those traits.

Few eighteen year-olds know what they want to do (most forty year-olds don’t either). Yet when the question is posed, it implicitly assumes they should.

If the answer is something like “engineer”, doctor”, “scientist”, or “lawyer” (as many kids assume it’s supposed to be), they’re applauded, with the decision reinforced by effusive praise when they pursue a degree from the “right” school.

But what if our rebellious twenty year-old (like most of us, and almost all of them) is unsure? Suppose instead he dips his toe in several ponds…learning jiu-jitsu and scuba diving, how to shoe horses, climb mountains, herd cattle, and fight wildfires, after earning certification as an EMT?

This would probably raise more eyebrows than champagne flutes among disapproving elders who insist college is the only way.

Yet these are among the many activities Maxim accomplished since he and I hung up the phone. He’s also become proficient shearing sheep, processing chickens, and butchering cows. In his “spare time”, he reads dozens of books, creates countless videos, and writes scores of articles.

And he’s still nineteen.

Having chosen Edmund Dantès as his avatar, Maxim picks activities based on who he wanted to be. What he’ll have will take care of itself.

It already is.

The First Cork

Like popping the first cork at an Irish wake, opening one door inevitably cracks the next. By becoming certified as an EMT, Maxim met the man who asked him to fight fires. He spent several months doing so last summer.

That job apparently paid well, and exposed him to other experiences that’ll guide where he wants to go next. Regardless what it is, he enters each new chapter with fresh attributes acquired from the last adventure.

Discovering capabilities and people you’d never otherwise find is an underrated benefit of this endeavor. All that’s needed is to get comfortable confronting fear, asking questions, and saying “yes.”

Maxim’s stage of life…with lots of energy, few obligations, and when almost everyone assumes you know nothing and is willing to help…is the ideal time to explore new things. As the book The Defining Decade reminds us, in ten years that won’t be the case.

At that point, there may be a family to feed, a job that can’t be ditched, and expectations among potential mentors that your thirty year-old self has accumulated a few accomplishments and has some idea what he’s doing. They’ll assume anyone who doesn’t by then isn’t serious enough to be worth assisting.

And they’ll probably be right.

JD