This is a presentation for High school students about their life after high school. I talk about: what are your options, how to learn what path is best for you and how can you achieve your goals.
Watch the life after High School Video of this talk
See the life after High School Slide deck
- Introduction
- Who is this guy?
- Emily’s Story
- Chris’ Story
- Chika’s Story
- Hope’s Story
- How to Pay For School
- How Atila.ca helps you get more money for school
- Conclusion
Introduction
First, everyone stand up, I think you’re going to find this next part interesting. Sit down if you know exactly what you want to do when you graduate high school and you know exactly what you need to do to get there. Look around the room, you see that more people are standing up relative to how many people are sitting down. Keep standing. Understand that if you feel like you have no idea what you want to do with your life, understand that you are not alone. Everyone that is standing up is in the same boat as you. You can sit down now.
The funny part about that experiment is that even though you folks are just in high school, if I asked this question in my university class, they would probably have the same reaction. I even wonder if I asked this question in a room full of adults, I think at least 50% of people would remain standing.
I say all that to say this, you are not alone. Most people don’t really have a clear idea on what they want to do with their life. Figuring out what you want to do with your life is, in my opinion, the most important question facing humanity today. Yet we don’t spend enough time talking about it. Which is why I’m here. I’m still trying to figure it out myself so I don’t have “the answer” and there is no “answer” but I’m here to share some advice on what helped me figure out what I want to do with my life and lessons learned along the way.
Who is this guy?
First of all, who does this guy think he is? Walks in here talking about let me help you figure out what you want to do with your life. Well let me tell you who think I am.
My name is Tomiwa and I was born in the beautiful city of Lagos in Nigeria. How many of you were born or your parents were born in a different country? Nigeria is a wonderful country and I love Nigeria, but when I turned eight years old my parents made what I consider to be the best decision for me and our family. They immigrated to Canada, what I consider to be, the land of opportunity.
So we moved to Canada, in the suburbs just outside of Toronto and definitely had the prototypical immigrant childhood. My parents always valued education and that school was the way to success. Most of you have parents similar to mine, you can be anything you want as long as it’s a lawyer, doctor or an engineer. Just like most of you I spent hours trying to research what was the best choice for me.
But I can’t lie to you guys. One of my biggest motivators, was 5 letter word that starts with M, does anyone know what it is? Money! I remember literally googling “best paying jobs” and “best paying degrees”. Engineering was like 6 of the 10 best paying degrees and the best paying jobs was investment banking (aka business). So I decided I would study “engineering” and “business”.
So I worked really hard and I got into one of the best business schools in the country, Ivey business school. I also played soccer competitively so I got a scholarship to play on the varsity soccer team. Things were looking pretty good at that time, I was playing on the varsity soccer team, I was in the perfect degree to get that investment banking job and secure the bag. Then… plot twist. I get injured. For those of you who are really good at sports or school or music etc. That thing starts to define you. Everyone knew me as “the soccer guy” so once I got injured I had to basically create a new identity.
That’s when I started really reading about entrepreneurship and technology startups. Then I started thinking, wait a minute, there’s this amazing thing called the internet that is literally booming in front of us. Why am I wasting my time in school and trying to be an investment banker. So I decided to drop out of university for a year and start my own company, atila.ca, which I will talk about later. My parents as most of you can imagine, were very upset.
All my friends and family thought I was crazy, so many people were trying to change my mind, that even I started feeling like I was crazy, but I wasn’t, I was just following my heart. Follow your heart is one of those things that people call a cliche now but there’s a lot of truth to it. Maybe instead of telling people to “follow your heart”, we should say follow your truth, follow what you think is true.
Anyway, so I followed my truth and made one of the toughest decisions in my life. Looking back it’s funny how scared I was to make this decision and it ended up being one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I was the very first engineer for a startup called Properly, I travelled across Europe with my friend Val, I grew my business.
Okay, but what does it matter? This is just one guy’s story. Well actually it’s not even about me. So I have this podcast called Atila TV and I’ve interviewed a lot of young people and I am going to share their stories with you today to help you decide what you want to do with your life.
Emily’s Story
Emily was the very first guest I had on Atila TV. How many of you want to go to medical school? So Emily actually got into U of T medical school before she even graduated from university. It’s interesting because some people don’t get into medical school even after graduating from university AND doing a master’s degree, but she got into medical school without any degree and got into UofT medical school one of the best schools in the country.
So I’m sure when people find out that she got into medical school, everyone’s like “Oh Emily, you’re so smart, you’re so lucky”. Emily is a very smart and hardworking girl so all those things are true. But one thing Emily did really well which people don’t talk about enough is that she takes excellent initiative. So when she was in High school, she called every single Optometrist, Doctor, Dentist in Oakville, where she’s from and said “Hey my name is Emily, I think I’m interested in this field, do you mind if I shadow you or ask you some questions about your job”.
This does two things. One it helps you figure out if you really want to do that job. Being a doctor is extremely prestigious. How many of you are immigrants. So there’s this stereotype that all immigrants want their kids to be doctors. So by Emily shadowing doctors it helped her realize if this is truly something that she would want to do and she wasn’t just in love with the idea of it. The other thing this does is it helped her figure out the HOW. Sometimes in life it feels like there is your current position, your ending position and no idea how to get to your Goal, it’s like a maze. But the other benefit of talking to people who are doing what you want to be doing is you learn, How they did it. Everyone’s path is going to be slightly different but it helps you figure out how to do it.
So that’s my first lesson: find a mentor. If you think you’re interested in a certain profession. Find someone who is doing what you want to be doing and just ask if you can talk with them for 15 minutes. What you want to figure out is if you could see yourself doing what they do for a living. The second thing is you want to reverse engineer how they got there and see what steps you need to take.
Two important points about this. First, this works for literally any profession. You’re probably thinking oh, I can’t do this only doctors or lawyers or accountants can do that. I’m telling you this works for any field. If you want to be a personal trainer or a carpenter, a nurse, even a Youtuber. Find someone who does that job and ask if you can follow them for a day or talk to them for 15 minutes. There are lots of tools available for you now, you don’t even have to call them anymore. Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, tools that you can talk to literally anyone in the world no matter who you are. Take advantage of these tools. Literally every single person that I am going to talk about today has an Instagram account. If any of their stories sound interesting, you can easily DM any of them. I dare you to do it.
Chris’ Story
Next story I have is Chris Egi. Chris was my final guest for the last season of Atila TV and his story is super inspiring. Long story short this guy is good at everything. He played high school basketball with D’Angelo Rusell and Ben Simmons. How many of you know D’Angelo Rusell and Ben Simmons? Then he got into Havard, graduated valedictorian in his class, works at Goldman Sachs, the best investment bank in the world and also started a non-profit while fighting police brutality.
I learnt a lot from that interview with Chris. The first lesson is that life is not a Netflix special, no one knows the storyline beforehand. Chris has a very blessed life, but while he was in university, he had a serious injury that caused him to retire from basketball. While all of this was happening, his father passed away.
Like I said earlier, he played basketball with Ben Simmons who is now in the NBA, there is a very good chance he could have gone to the NBA himself and his father to walk him across the stage when he graduates. No one could have foreseen him getting injured and no one expects their parents to pass away while they are in university.
But what is most impressive is how he was able to bounce back. He ended up getting a prestigious job at one of the top banks in the country. Now he has done work with Nike and his organization was able to get Dave East and Vic Mensa to come talk at their events.
This is very important, because for most of you in this room, you have never really faced setbacks. Your life usually goes like this. Work really hard, get what you want. Work really hard, get what you want. In life things will happen that you didn’t see coming. Just remember that your life is not like a Netflix special, it’s more like a twitch or Youtube livestream. No one knows what’s going to happen but you get to decide what happens next.
Chika’s Story
Next, we have Chika. Chika was also a medical student like Emily. She went into both McMaster Health Science and U of T Medical School. How many of you want to go to McMaster health Science? Yeah, so you probably know that is a very difficult program to get into. Chika is an extremely focused and organized person. Just like all these other people that I mentioned. But what stood out from this interview is how she answered one question.
I have this question where I ask people. Where do you see yourself a year, five years and 25 years from now. So when I asked her where she sees herself in the future she had a very interesting answer. She says that she sees herself writing poetry and making movies. I was so surprised, this is someone that has been super tracked to go to medical school for over a decade and what she wants to do is write movies?
But this is the lesson. Don’t put yourself into a box. A lot of us when we’re young have a thing that we’re known for. Some of us we’re known as “the volleyball girl” or “ The student government guy”, some of us we’re known for being smart or known for being good at music. This is a great thing, it’s good to be known for being talented. This can be also end up putting ourselves in a mental prison. I just want to say to you, that we are not ants. We are not built to do one thing and one thing only. Don’t be afraid to try new things, even if it’s different from what you’re “supposed” to be doing, we’re not “supposed” to do anything. The only thing we’re “supposed” to do is to live and survive.
Hope’s Story
Final story, for you is Hope’s story. This might be my favorite of all the stories I’ve said today and it’s the most different. So all the stories I’ve shared so far today are all people that can be called early risers. These are people that have for the most part, always been very successful at what they’ve done from a very young age. The challenge with their stories is that most people are not like that. Some people sort of just drift through life and it takes them a while to figure it out. This brings me to Hope.
When I first met Hope, he was a skinny freshman in high school, wasn’t the best at sports, didn’t have the best grades. He had a job at grocery stor, pushing carts or something like that. Anyway, so imagine this, not good at sports, not getting great grades, and he’s not even making that much money.
But the trick was that Hope simply needed to find out what he enjoyed doing, what his strengths were and combine that together. So the thing about Hope is that he is a very charismatic guy, the kind of person you just enjoy being around. So he started training high school kids and young kids on how to play basketball, get stronger. So literally he would just record himself working people out, put that on his Instagram page @hope__fitness and it blew up from there.
When I took this picture with Hope, he was on his way to do a modelling shoot for Nike and he was telling me just turned down a coaching job that would be paying him more than most of my friends who graduated from university are making.
So my final lesson to you is that don’t worry if it seems like your life is not exactly where you want it to be. Not everyone has to go to university, there is a lot of social pressure for people to go to university, but different people have different paths. I’ve found that the most important trait is work ethic and hustle. Just make sure that whatever path you decide to pick, you work very hard at it.
Think of your life like a neverending season of Game of Thrones, just because the first episode isn’t great, you will still have more episodes to watch and you can still have a great season finale.
Laura’s Story
So this is a final bonus story that I am going to throw in here. This story is actually not even aimed at the students but at the teachers and any parents in the room.
One of the people I interviewed is a lady called Laura DeSimone. so Laura is a teacher and she’s also a Reiki yoga instructor and I’ll never forget something she said during the interview.
Me: So Laura what is something you would tell all the teachers and parents about educating young people.
Laura: That the number one job of a teacher is to teach students to love themselves.
Me: But Laura, what about getting good grades and getting into a good school and getting a good job???
Laura: That part will come. The only reason people don’t reach their full potential is because there’s a part of themselves they don’t love.
That conversation really stuck with me because it’s so true. We think that our jobs as educators is to teach them math or science or all these topics. This is true to an extent, but if you think about the best teachers, what they do is they give you self-confidence that you can actually accomplish the task and then it’s your brain figures out how to get it done.
Final mic drop from Laura:
Me: okay, so how can teachers teach students self-love
Laura: Well before you can teach someone else self-love, you have to love yourself.
How to Pay For School
Now, suppose you decide to go to university or college like most of you will, it’s very important that you figure out how to pay for it. How important is this? Well let me ask you a question, how much debt do you think the average student graduates with? (Try to guess before you keep reading.)
$5,000
$10,000
$28,000
The answer is C. The average student graduates with about $28,000 in student loans. Even I personally have over, $60,000 in student loans.
How many of you currently have a part time job? How many of you have worked full-time before? Okay, so let me put this into context for just how much money this is. OSAP has a repayment calculator that shows you how much your monthly payment is going to be when you graduate from university. So with the averages, you can expect to pay about $350 every single month for the next 10 years. To put that in context, that’s like buying 3 new iPhone 11s every single year, 30 Starbucks Frappucinnos and for an extra $100 a month you could even buy a Tesla.
I’m not saying this to scare you. Well actually I am. That’s exactly why I am saying this. You should be scared because it’s a lot of money. But you can use fear in a negative or positive way. The negative way is to say that you won’t go to university or you won’t do the program you want to do or you try to avoid thinking about it until you can't avoid it any longer and start then you get anxiety.
The positive way to use this fear is to start thinking hard about how you’re going to pay for it and come up with a plan.
How Atila.ca gets you money for school
I know this because I also have this fear, I currently have over $68,000 in student loans because I attend the most expensive undergrad program in Canada. However, I chose to use this fear in a positive way to help people like you and me pay for school and start atila.ca to help students pay for their education.
I really encourage you all to check it out when you get home. The idea is very simple: You make an account and enter what school and program you are interested in. The algorithm then helps you find all the scholarships that match your profile. So for example, I go to Western university and study engineering, so the algorithm automatically finds me all the scholarships that are for students at Western University and who study engineering.
This is very important because there’s a lot of scholarships out there. In fact, about $5 million that goes unused every year. So having a system that filters and sorts all these scholarships for you will save you a lot of time. And make sure that you maximize the amount of money you get because you will need every dollar you can get.
The next part is the application process. So even after you’ve found the scholarship that you like, it still takes a long time to apply for scholarships. So many questions will ask you, oh what do you want to do after you graduate from school. Then you think to yourself, I already answered this question, I wish there was a way for me to reuse an answer I’ve already used. So with Atila you can do that. You answer a question once and anytime a similar question is being asked, it automatically fills in for you.
So the algorithm is smart enough to know that if one scholarship asks, “What are your career plans after you graduate?” and another question asks “What career would you like to have?” the algorithm knows that it is a similar question and will automatically prefill it for you. Imagine how much time this can save you.
There’s another really cool thing which Atila can do. So there’s this really annoying thing about scholarships where one scholarship will say, what do you want to do when you graduate (700 words). Then another scholarship will say, what do you want to do when you graduate (500 words). Now you have to figure out how to rewrite the entire application using 200 words.
With Atila, you no longer have to worry about all that. If you’ve answered the same or even a similar question, Atila will find that question and autofill the question for you. Then, if you need to reduce the word count our algorithm will automatically reduce the word count for you.
This is important because the less time you spend answering the same questions over and over again, this gives you back your most valuable asset, Time. You now have more time to apply for more scholarships, work a part time job, study more or even just relaxing.
So like I said, the average student is going to graduate with about $28,000 in student loans. You should be scared by that number because it is a lot of money. But remember to use that fear in a positive way, to motivate you to think hard about how you will pay for school and make a plan.
Conclusion
There’s been a lot of information I’ve covered here today so I want to summarize the 5 key points.
You don't need to know exactly what you want to do with your life. But to get a better idea of what interests you, you need to develop self awareness. All the information I’ve given today is completely useless if you don’t develop self-awareness and figure out what YOU want.
Think of your purpose as a venn diagram of what makes money, what you enjoy and what you’re good at. You should be able to at least figure out what you enjoy and what you’re good at. Once you know those two, don’t worry society will let you know very quickly what makes money.
Here are some ways to develop self awareness:
Talk to people who have what you want and try to figure out if they are happy with their life and if your personality would be happy doing what they do
Take a personality test. not because they are accurate but because they may reveal things about yourself: Big 5 and Myers-Briggs are common ones
Journal or do a private video diary of your thoughts. A week, a month and a year later revisit it to see what your thought process was like.
Find someone you trust and ask them to psychoanalyze you. Ask them to be brutally honest with you and what they think your biggest strengths and weaknesses are.
Experiment, treat your life like a mini-science experiment. If you think you might like something, think of the smallest experiment you can run to figure out if you actually like it or you just like the “idea” of it and test your hypothesis.
Finally, school is very expensive. Some of you will owe about $30,000 when you graduate. If this scares you it’s not a bad thing. Fear is fuel and it can be good or bad depending on how you use it. When you put in on wood it burns a house down, when you put it in your lamborghini, it can go over 300 km/h. The same fuel that can burn down everything you’ve built. You can take that exact same fuel and use it to take you places.
So take that fear use it as fuel and put it in your Lamborghini. Finally, remember your life is not a Netflix Special. It's a Youtube livestream. No one knows how your movie ends, but only you can control what happens next.