 What's happening guys? It's Shane here. So one of my most popular videos to date was the college degrees that are actually worth it video where I went over the types of degrees that you can earn a lot of money from so that you don't go to college and end up becoming a debt slave. This is fine. I'm okay with the events that are unfolding currently. And after that video posted, I kept on getting hit up by a lot of people asking how can you choose a college major specifically for you? And I know that a lot of you are thinking about skipping college and you might be thinking about whether or not you're even going to go to college or if it's a waste of time for you. So I'm going to be sharing my thoughts on this because this is a huge decision that you should definitely take your time with and there's a lot that goes into choosing the best option. So I am someone who did go to college. I played the game of loans in one and I actually went all the way from undergraduate all the way through graduate school and I got my doctorate. And let me go grab that really quickly. One moment. I have minutes later. Okay, I'm back. So yeah, here is my very expensive piece of paper. I don't know if you guys can see it very well. But yeah, here is my doctorate. Cool story, bro. And the crazy thing is is that the average person will change their major three times in college and only about 25% of them will end up getting a job that has anything to do with their major. And out of those people, you have to think like how many of them are actually happy with their job? Probably half at most. Yet I was able to choose a degree and a major to go for at 17 years old and I landed a job. I went all the way through, didn't change my major once, and I'm in a career that I'm very happy with. And like I said, I've been through the whole system from undergraduate to graduate school. I've seen it all. I've made a lot of mistakes. I've made some good decisions. And if you watch this video until the end, you will definitely learn a lot about what you should and should not do. And I can guarantee you that this will make it much easier for you to make the right choice for your future. And I'm making this video because when I was younger, there was no video out there to help with this situation. At least if there was, I wasn't able to find it because if I did find it, I would have destroyed the living daylights out of the like button. No, but seriously, before I start on this video, I would sincerely appreciate if you did hit the like button because it really does help with the algorithm and it actually does help the channel out a lot. So with that being said, sit back, relax, and enjoy the video. So when it comes to picking your major, there's really five easy steps that you want to do in order. And the first step might sound stupidly simple, but you want to identify what you like, identify your own interests. And for some reason, it can be really hard for us to be honest with ourselves about what we really like and what really makes us happy. Not what makes our parents happy. Not what makes our girlfriend happy. Not what makes other people happy. What makes you happy. So the best thing you can do is just grab a pen and paper right now and just make a list of 10 things that you really enjoy. And don't even think about careers, just things that you enjoy in general. They might have to do with a career and maybe they don't have to do with a career, but just make a list of things that you really like. And you really want to just go all out with this list and just whatever pops into your head, it doesn't matter how silly it sounds or how ridiculous it sounds, write it down. And you want to make a list of at least 10 or more things. And if you can't think of a single thing, I literally want you to just stop right now, pause the video, go out and just try stuff until you find something that you enjoy and something that makes you happy. So if you're passionate about PewDiePie videos, then write that down. If you're passionate about making coffee, write that down. If you're passionate about listening and watching ASMR videos, which are those weird videos where people make really quiet sounds loud, I don't get them at all, but they're really popular right now on YouTube, you get the idea, write that down. Now, after you've taken the time to do that, the next step is going to be to identify what you're good at as well as what you're bad at. And I just want to say really quickly that I do think that talent is overrated. I think that hard work is going to be talent 99 out of 100 times. And you've probably noticed that the person who gets the best grades in your class generally is not the smartest person. They're usually the hardest working person. And a lot of the time, the smartest person is the person that does the bare minimum and just sits in the back of the class and just doesn't really do much at all because they can. But at the same time, I think it's very important for you to be honest about your current skills so that you have a good idea about what you need to work on right now. And I think it's just very important to be practical. So an example of this would be if you're really bad at math, chances are you don't like math. And so it wouldn't make sense for you to go into engineering or physics or like theoretical math or anything like that because you don't like it and chances are you're really bad at it as well. And it can honestly be very, very difficult for us to be honest with ourselves and see what we're good at and bad at. So what I recommend doing is actually asking your friends and family. And you might think this is really awkward to do, but I'll provide kind of a little description, a little list of something that you can send to them. You can just tell them that, you know, you're taking a leadership class or something along those lines. This is a leadership class right now. Okay, you can just tell them that and just send them this and just, you know, maybe send it to 20 to 30 people and see what kind of responses that you get. And bonus points if you ask a few people who don't like you. And seriously, the sooner you do this, the better. I think everybody ends up eventually doing this. So you should just get it out of the way now and just go ahead, send the message to your friends and your family. Now the next thing that you need to do, and this is so, so crucial and important, is you need to figure out what your goals are for the future. You want to figure out what kind of lifestyle you want in the future. How much you want to make? When do you want to retire? Where do you want to live? Do you want to be a boss? Do you want to be an employee? Do you want to be someone who's in leadership position? You need to figure these things out. And it's very, very important that you do so. This step is so crucial because if you don't have goals in life, you're just going to kind of randomly go in circles and you're never going to really have a strong direction. And when you have goals and you have a strong direction, it will be like a North Star that always guides you in the direction that you want to go. And the path that you take in order to get to that goal is going to be different depending on what the goal is. So for instance, maybe you want to buy a bunch of lambos and just like sip martinis and eat avocado toast on the beach all day long every single day. I bumped into a Lamborghini and another Lamborghini. Few more Lamborghini. Found five Lamborghini. Or maybe you want to be a minimalist that doesn't spend hardly any money, doesn't really need that much money, and you like reuse your toilet paper or something like that. You have a little bin underneath the basket that holds the little toilet wipes where we put them so we can wash them later. Obviously, the direction that you go in life is going to be completely different depending on which goal you choose. Now, one thing I do want to note here is making money will make you happy up to a point. And after you get to that particular point, making more money really is not going to make you that much more happy. Now, there's different studies on this, but the general consensus is your happiness isn't going to increase much after you're making more than around 70 to $95,000 a year. So this is just something to keep in mind and you should probably go for a career where you can make at least $70,000 a year. So now you know what you enjoy, you know what you're good at and what you're not so good at, and you know what you want to achieve in the future. So the next step, step four is to do some research and figure out what majors align with your goals and the first two steps. Now, there are a lot of majors out there, but I did find a chart that kind of shows the starting salaries for all of the different majors. So go ahead and just pause the video and just look at the starting salaries and try to choose one that's above $70,000 a year if you can. And this should help you narrow it down depending on your individual choices. And now I'm going to say something that I think is probably going to be a little bit controversial and I really don't mean to offend anybody, but you know, even if something is your passion, I really don't think you should pursue a degree in it unless that degree will directly lead to you making money from that passion. And the reason for this is because there are so many free resources out there. So let's take history, for example. History is one of my biggest passions. And if you're interested in history, I recommend you check out, you know, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History series, or you can even check out the hundreds of free classes offered online if you want to seriously study the material. And many of these courses are from Ivy League universities like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, et cetera. So the absolutely best education that you could possibly get. And it's all for free. Now there are a lot of really good sites out there that you can do your research on in terms of, you know, finding something that pays well, that has good job satisfaction, all that sort of thing. But a couple of really good ones are going to be salary.com and glassdoor.com. Now while you're doing this, what you want to do is you want to make a list of at least 10 majors that fit those criteria that I talked about before. And these are majors that you potentially could see yourself doing for the next 20, 30 years. They're majors that you could make good money from and you would live a happy life. And if you've been doing your research and nothing gets you excited, then I highly recommend either A, not going to college or B, going to a community college and then just taking general classes for very, very cheap and seeing what you like. I like to have fun, fun, so after you've made this list, you want to start narrowing it down and looking at three things specifically. You want to look at the demand for the job right now. You want to look at the demand for the job in the future. So the projected future job growth potential. And then you also want to look up the job satisfaction rating for people who are doing the job right now. Now after doing this, you probably narrowed the list down to about three to five careers or so that really stand out to you. And what you want to start doing at this point is you want to start actually contacting people who are working in these careers. And you can do this by calling them, politely asking them if they can answer a few questions, going to different career fairs or different events that these people might be at. Just try not to be creepy about this and try to be respectful and these people will probably be happy to answer your questions. I just love surprising you. And if you have the time, you can even go ahead and shadow some of these people. And that's where you basically go in and you spend a few hours with them, maybe even the whole day, just kind of following them around, seeing what they do on a day to day basis. And after doing this, you will find that you will naturally start getting really excited about one of them and leaning towards one of them. And that is the one that you should definitely go with. So there you go. That is the five steps. But I'm going to take this one step further and give you an example from my life. So from step one, I've always enjoyed teaching, problem solving, experimenting, science, helping people out. From step two, I've always been good at experimenting, helping people out, teaching. And I've always wanted to go into something where I felt like I was making a difference and helping other people out. So from step three, I knew that I wanted to retire before the age of 40. I knew that I wanted to travel the world at some point. And when I did decide to settle down, I would probably settle down in San Diego and live a very comfortable lifestyle where I could either work or not work. It really wouldn't matter because I'd have enough money to support myself. So from step four, I don't really remember the exact list that I made, but I made a list of 10 careers that looked something like this. Doctor, geologist, petroleum engineering, computer engineering, computer science, pharmacist, architect, physician's assistant, biomechanical engineering, and physical therapist. And I started looking into all of these and I crossed doctor off the list because it took too long and I wouldn't be able to retire early if I became a medical doctor. I crossed geologist and architect off the list because after looking at it more deeply, I found that I wasn't really interested in doing the day to day stuff that they do. I crossed all of the engineering ones off the list because I'm really not that good at math. Then I contacted individual people that worked in the remaining careers and I basically just asked them, you know, how did they like their career? Would they have done a different career if they had another choice? And I saw what they did on a day to day basis and that combined with personal reasons made me lean towards pharmacy and it really became very obvious which one that I should go for. So I went for pharmacy, I never changed my major once because I'd done all the research at the beginning and this is one of the things I'm so so grateful that I did because it saved me so much time, so much frustration and I saw all of my friends or a lot of my friends ending up, you know, going in one direction and then changing their major and it was just something that really stressed them out and caused a lot of issues in their life. And like I said before, if you've watched this video and your passion isn't something that is not related to a college degree then I highly recommend just don't go to college because going that deep into debt that you can't default on is just not a really good idea and that debt will follow you for the rest of your life and that's a decision that you're making at the ripe old age of, you know, 17 or 18 years old and that's probably not a good idea because if you're anything like me at that age listen you do not know about my man now if you're looking for a straight up list of the college majors that are objectively just the best ones to go into then I did do a video on that and you can check that out right here and I would really appreciate it if you smash the like button hit the subscribe button ring the notification bell and comment down below any ideas that you have for future videos because I'm going to be dropping some big time value bombs in the next few weeks and you definitely do not want to miss out anyways hope you have a good one and bye for now