 Here's a statistic for you. About two thirds of people who get a college degree have regrets about their education choices. And this is for a lot of different reasons, but in this video, I'm gonna be going over the ones that I see most commonly as somebody who has worked with hundreds of different people to help them choose the perfect college major for them. And this is not only as someone who's gone all the way through the college education system, the university system from undergraduate to getting my doctorate degree, but I've also been studying this stuff for years, making hundreds of videos, spending thousands of hours studying it and working with hundreds of people to help them choose the best college major for them. And it became very obvious to me after consulting with so many people that I simply do not have enough time to talk to each person individually. And so what I did is I created the College 101 course and that's basically my life's work. And you can find that down in the description below. This will teach you how to choose your dream college degree, get the most out of college with the least amount of effort and land your first entry level job right after graduating. So if that's something that interests you, give it a look for a short period of time, I will be offering a discount down in the description below and I'm not just saying that, this is definitely going to be discounted and it's probably going to double in the near future. But with that being said, let's jump into the most common mistakes that I see and the first most common one is going all in on the money. I think this is probably because just the nature of my channel in general, but a lot of the people who I talk to seem to have this issue where they're kind of just going all in on the money. They want to go for the degree that makes the most possible money. And this is a huge mistake and I've gone over these studies and other videos so you can check those out if you want to go over them in more detail but basically you're not going to be any happier after around $75 to $80,000 a year. That's where your happiness maxes out. That's where you're basically taking care of all of the normal life problems that pretty much everybody has. And another way of thinking about it is by making a certain amount of money, it's not that you're making yourself more happy, it's that you're decreasing the amount of unhappiness that you experience. So if you don't make enough money to pay your rent, for instance, you're going to feel a lot of pressure. That pressure is going to turn into stress. Stress can lead to other things. It can lead to anxiety. It can lead to depression. In extreme cases, it can even lead to you having autoimmune disorders. So I think that there's a healthy amount of stress and it's a good thing as long as it's done in moderation, you do want to push yourself a little bit but there's obviously a point where it gets to, the point where it's extremely unhealthy. So you do want to make sure that you're going into a career where you're gonna make enough money but I'm telling you it's not gonna make you any happier once you're past like maybe six figures a year. The next biggest mistake I see is when someone goes all in on passion. So they basically choose the thing that they're most passionate about and they try to make a career out of it. So you might be passionate about watching Netflix or passionate about playing video games. Personally, I like both of those things. I also am very passionate about history, filmmaking. I also enjoy eating good food and all of those things that I just mentioned are things that I chose to keep as hobbies, right? They're not things that I chose to make a career out of. And the truth is if I tried to make a career out of many of those things, it probably would ruin my passion for it. And someone left in the comments section this really good analogy for this, which is, let's say you chose your ringtone, the, you know, what you wake up to in the morning, your alarm clock as your favorite song. That would probably ruin the song for you because most people are not very happy when they wake up first thing in the morning. And if you're hearing your favorite song right off the bat, that would probably ruin it for you. It would spoil it. And this is the same thing about trying to make something that's just a hobby into your career. Now that doesn't mean you can't integrate your hobbies into your career. It also doesn't mean in very rare circumstances that, you know, people are in a position where their number one passion, they can turn that into their career. But the brutal truth is, and this is something that almost nobody is going to tell you, is that no matter what you do, you're never going to avoid work, okay? You're always going to end up working. A lot of the time people will go into, and I know I pick on psychology all the time just because it's so popular, but a lot of the time, people will end up going into psychology because they think, oh, psychology is very interesting. And then they think they can get a job with a bachelor's degree. They can't. They have to get at least a master's or a doctorate. And then what they end up doing at the end of the day when they finally get their first job is like six to seven hours of paperwork and then maybe one hour of psychology. And it's probably not even the type of psychology that they thought they were going to be doing. So the next biggest mistake that I see so many people make is treating their student loans like monopoly money. And this is very easy to do because this is the only type of loan that a 17 or an 18 year old can take out without any loan history or any work history or anything like that. Let's talk about other types of loans besides student loans. Let's say you try to get a mortgage loan, a loan for a house, for instance. They are going to run an extensive credit check on you. They're going to look at your history, your job history, your credit, et cetera. And they're going to look at how much can you afford on this loan and that is how they are going to decide how much they can give you for a house or the interest rate they're going to charge you or even if they're going to give you the loan at all. Whereas with student loans, it's nothing like this. It's essentially a blank check. Now there are some positives to that and there are some negatives to that. It was originally designed to be a very good thing where they could get people who come from low income or medium income backgrounds the same education that rich people could get. So as somebody who grew up dirt poor myself, I do really appreciate the fact that this is an option for us. However, the way they're running it, in my opinion, is really bad because it essentially incentivizes these schools to just keep on raising tuition at a much higher pace than inflation. It's essentially just a blank check to these schools and they can just keep raising tuition and making excuses about why they're doing it. And this is why the student loan crisis has just gotten out of control. You've got people who first of all, probably can't afford the loans. They're much more expensive than they should be, probably four or five times more expensive and they're getting degrees where it's just a passion and it's probably not going to lead to a stable career. So realize that you will have to pay these student loans off. There's a lot of talk right now in the media about, oh, this person's going to forgive 10,000. Oh, this person's trying to forgive 50,000. Well, hey, maybe 10,000 will be forgiven and if that happens, that's awesome, but don't bank on it, okay? It's not a smart move to bank on this because I can almost guarantee you as somebody who's really looked into it that maybe some part of it will be forgiven but it's probably not all going to be forgiven. The average person is taking around 18 to 20 years in order to pay their student loans off from college and so that means the average person is paying it off when they're about 42 years old. So they're still in debt until they're 42. So do not treat student loans like monopoly money, only take out as much as you can afford and try to get as many scholarships and grants as possible and keep your costs low. Now the next biggest issue I see is not trying different things out. So this is especially, I think, a big problem for somebody who's introverted. Now somebody who's extroverted and just more outgoing has probably tried a bunch of different things out. They've kind of just sampled a bunch of different things and so they sort of know what they enjoy, right? And so we talked about what your passions are and also what your strengths are but how are you gonna know what your passions and your strengths are if you haven't tried different things? So I know this is kind of a basic thing but in order to figure out what you're good at and what you like, you do have to actually try different things out. So you wanna kind of just treat it like a sample platter. Look into different classes online. There's a lot of college 101 type courses that are offered online from some of the best universities in the world, right? Harvard, Stanford, et cetera. They all offer free classes online and you can take them completely free. They'll even tell you what the textbook was. They'll give you practice questions and even tests in many cases. Not to mention the fact that you will have live recordings of the lectures. So you can kind of just sample a bunch of different things out. It's also just pretty obvious like the internet is out there. You can use YouTube, Reddit, podcasts, just to sample different subjects. But yeah, this is a very easy step to overlook but you do wanna make sure that you try different things out just to see what you like and see what you're naturally good at. And then I do think it's a good idea to double down and even triple or quadruple down on your strengths. Now the next biggest issue I see is when people don't have a plan and it's very important for you to have a plan and I've said this before but have a plan even if it's a bad one, right? Imagine if you were like a plane and you took off in your plane and you just don't know where you're going, right? You have no idea where you're going. You just fly around in circles. Eventually you run out of gas and there's nowhere to land and then you crash, right? Obviously that would be a horrible idea but it's very important for you to have an idea of where you're going. You know what direction you're going, how far it's going to take you in order to get there, how long it's going to take you. If you don't have a plan you're basically just gonna be like a leaf that's just blowing around in the wind. So you wanna think of your plan as almost like a map, right? You wanna have a map and figure out where you are right now and where you're going, how far that is and how long it's gonna take you to get there. Now the map itself is not going to be the journey, right? Because a map isn't gonna tell you, oh, by the way, when you get to this halfway point there's gonna be like a bear that's walking around and you probably wanna avoid that bear and then, oh, when you get next to the water over here there's a bunch of crocodiles. So you wanna avoid those crocodiles, right? So the map's probably not gonna tell you that. But at the very least, it's going to give you the basics of what you need to do in order to get to your destination. But another problem I see is people have a plan but they don't really research it and improve it, right? So having a plan is good but chances are the first plan you come up with is not going to be perfect. So it is important that you come up with a plan even if it's a bad one but if it does end up being bad you can go back later on and figure out why that was. Maybe it's that you're just not very passionate about it. Maybe it's that you thought it was a certain way like the career was a certain way and then it ended up maybe shadowing them and you're just very bored. You don't wanna do that. The picture that you have in your head of what a career is like is probably completely different than what the actual career is like and a perfect example of that is doctors. If you go into health or if you just go into a degree path where you have to take some of the intro level science courses, you are gonna run into, I swear it's like at least 50% of the class is going to be pre-med, right? So about 50% of the class is gonna be people who want to become doctors and the truth is most of these people are not going to make it of course because it's extremely competitive and more than that, most of them have no idea what they're getting themselves into. Thank goodness a lot of med schools actually require people to shadow because once they start shadowing doctors and seeing what they actually do on a day-to-day basis, they realize, oh, it's not like it is on Nip Tuck or one of those shows that they've been watching since they were 14. And a lot of the time they realize that the only reason they're going into the career to become a doctor is because their family has been kind of coercing them to do that since they were young. So a lot of people will go into college thinking, oh, I wanna become a doctor and then when they actually look into it, when they actually research it, they realize I don't wanna become a doctor because I don't wanna work 80 hours a week and have no life and all the other things that come along with it. So in that case, as long as they had a plan, they can go back and look at their plan and say, you know what, I think the reason I didn't wanna become a doctor is because of the fact that they just work so much and it's so difficult in order to do it. It takes way too long. However, the reason I wanted to get into the career in the first place is because I wanted to help people out, right? And that's kind of why I was attracted to the medical field. And so what they can do is they can be like, okay, I will look into other medical related degrees and medical related careers. Now that's a very simple example, but it's important that you had a plan in the first place so that you can figure out why that plan was wrong and then go back and improve it. And one big thing you can do, especially when you kind of whittled it down to a certain amount of careers that you're interested in, is actually asking people in those careers. And that brings me to the next point, which is asking the wrong people for advice. You know, you might run into some random person who loves to give their unsolicited opinion to people and they're just like, oh yeah, you know what? You know what you should do? You should become a lawyer. How did they know that you should become a lawyer? Are they a lawyer? Of course not. They're just giving their advice just based off of hearsay and maybe something that was true 20 years ago, but it's not necessarily true today. And the important thing here is that you ask the right people for advice. So if you are interested in becoming a physician assistant, for instance, you should try to find either physician assistants or the people who hire them. So recruiters, hiring managers, or business owners. Ask them for advice on what would be the best path in order to become a physician assistant and whether it's a good option for you as well. So when it comes to doing research, there is two different types of research, right? There's general information and then specific information. And you can get a lot of great general information just off of the internet. Lots of different websites like Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, et cetera can give you good general information. However, when you whittle it down to a small enough list, you want to get specific information and that is seeking people out who are actually in the career. And then you would ask those people key questions which are going to be important. So for instance, you might wanna ask them, what's the most important thing I can do when it comes to getting hired? And they might tell you get work experience, right? So more important than anything else, more important than getting good grades or joining a bunch of clubs is for you to have a part-time job during college. Or they might tell you the opposite. Maybe they'll say getting good grades is the most important thing you can do because you wanna be able to get into a good grad school. The point here is you're not going to really know until you ask people their opinion and get a couple different opinions just because you might run into someone who's way too positive or way too negative. Get a couple different ones so you can have a balanced outlook. All right, so check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you and if you haven't done it already, go ahead, hit that like button, hit the subscribe button, leave a notification bell and comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera that you have on the video and I will see you next time.