RULE TO BREAK

“You need the right qualifications”

Sweating over coursework? Under pressure to get the best grades you can? Teachers or parents or friends or tutors telling you how your whole future depends on it? Let me tell you a secret – exam results really aren’t as important as everyone tells you.

They’re a shortcut. That’s all. A good exam grade tells a university or an employer what they need to know in the simplest way. But plenty of people have happy and successful lives on the back of some pretty rubbish exam results. Einstein famously failed his university entrance exam, proving that there’s also a lot exam results don’t say about you.

Look, I’m not saying don’t bother. For most people, life is a lot easier if they get the best grades they can. Plus if you’re young it certainly smoothes your relationship with your parents. But it’s not worth making yourself miserable over. You can retake exams, go back to college 5 or 25 years later, work your way up from the bottom, pick a career that doesn’t need qualifications … So long as you have dedication and aren’t afraid of hard work, you can do most things with or without good exam grades.

I’ll tell you something: since 2 years after I left school, not one employer has ever asked me what grades (if any) I got. OK, that wouldn’t happen in any career, but there are still countless jobs where experience and natural ability count for far more than exams. When you’re 18, they’re all an employer has to go on. By the time you’re 28, they’re far more interested in what you’ve done with the last 10 years of your life than what you did at school.

And another thing – I remember all that sweating over whether to take chemistry or physics, or which language option to do, or whether we really needed to take history. But unless you’re going into a very specific career such as medicine, I can tell you it just doesn’t matter what subjects you take. Take the ones you’ll enjoy.

Do you know, my commissioning editor for this book has a degree in physics. What damn use is that for a career in publishing? Bet she sweated buckets over choosing it when she was 18 though. I know a comedy writer who studied ancient Greek. I have a brother-in-law who agonized over whether to do philosophy or computing – not knowing then that he’d work in conservation, for which he’d actually want a degree in environmental biology. So he went back 5 years later and got one of those too.

You see? Everyone else just wants the best for you and all that stuff, and they feel safer if you get top grades, but the truth is that you may not need any of it – and if you do need something you don’t get, you can sort it out later. What appears to matter desperately now will seem like a fuss about nothing in a few years’ time.