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Good advice for graduates

The Sunday Column

There is an old saying that goes, “It’s a shame that youth is wasted on the young.” It implies that the delights, freedom and carefree lifestyle of being young is not appreciated until you have entered the more responsible phase of your life filled with problems, work and bills.

While we often associate age with wisdom, in many ways it is just the mirror image of the statement that “youth is wasted on the young.” Older, or should I more correctly say, more experienced people seem to have more “wisdom.”

They can easily point out what should be done or equally as important what should not be done. Is that because some people are naturally smarter and more intelligent than others or is it true that older people truly are wiser? I wonder if it is simply possible that people who seem to have the answers also have the experience to back up those answers? That thought process took me back over my own lifetime experiences and made me realize that wisdom comes to those with experience at any age who make few mistakes and have the ability to learn from those mistakes.

That in turn took me back to shortly after my college graduation when I was teaching electronics for the Army in Texas, teaching both classroom and electronic lab classes. In the labs, we worked with electrical missile control cabinets using low-voltage circuits to avoid killing the students, which meant filling out a lot of paperwork, until they became fully trained.

As part of the training, the instructors would put faulty components in the cabinet circuitry, allowing the students to safely troubleshoot the circuits to find the problem. As you might expect, during each class some students got their fingers in the wrong place resulting in sparks and a loud snap as they got a mild shock and jumped back.

Of course, the instructors would make a big deal out of this, often asking the student to show them what they did and sure enough they would reach in and say, “I touched this wire,” and POW, they got shocked again. It may seem cruel but it was a very effective learning process where getting a mild shock today could keep the student from getting killed in the future when they would be working with full power applied.

During one of our lab sessions, things were going smoothly and our students were getting the hang of things when I heard a loud CRACK from the other side of the room. Suddenly, I heard my name as a fellow instructor called me to his side saying, “You won’t believe the stupid thing I just did.” He proceeded to show me that while demonstrating a checking procedure to a student he inserted a meter lead into the cabinet to make a voltage check when his wedding ring, (which should have been removed), touched a live component and POW. Now that was stupid enough, but this time I had my head bent over the cabinet to see what he was doing and when he got shocked a second time he jerked his hand out giving me a bloody nose and a cut lip. The students got a big kick out of two “experts” making a rookie mistake.

The moral of this story is wisdom does not come with age, it comes from experience at any age. No one is born with wisdom.

If you are young, you automatically feel you know everything and don’t need any advice. Trust me, you are wrong! Don’t be stupid and don’t assume you know everything, because you don’t. You will learn this eventually if you don’t kill yourself first. When offered advice, you don’t have to follow it but listen to it and evaluate it for yourself. You are old enough to make your own mistakes but it makes no sense to make the road of life harder than it will be. People can make it easier if you just listen. A very good friend of mine once said, “If I had my life to live over again, I would have listened to the old guys.”

John Kasun writes from his home in Duncansville where he often says, “the only thing good about being stupid is there is so much to learn.”

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