There Are No Rules for Success

By Andy Kessler Write to kessler@wsj.com.

The Wall Street Journal
Sep 22, 2025

Young people, are you OK? “It’s the Worst Time to Be a College Graduate in Years,” reads a Newsweek headline. The Federal Reserve warns, “Recent College Grads Bear Brunt of Labor Market Shifts.” For 22- to 30year-old computer-science graduates, employment has been falling.\r

Why? Is it ChatGPT? Tariffs? Late in the economic cycle? No matter, the unwritten social contract for success that’s been drilled into your conscience—good grades, decent college, job loyalty, home mortgage, retirement account—feels completely broken. It may be time to create your own job.\r

Everyone offers you rules for success. Arnold Schwarzenegger: “Have a vision” and “Work your ass off.” Warren Buffett: “Successful investing takes time, discipline and patience.” All reasonable, but vague. I prefer J.K. Rowling: “I’ve winged it my whole life. I’ve messed up regularly. There are no rules. Do your thing.” Better yet, listen to Thomas Edison: “Hell! There ain’t no rules around here! We are trying to accomplish somep’n.”\r

The world puts you in silos. Author Kyla Scanlon divides Generation Z into “safety seekers” and “digital gamblers.” Plausible, except careers that were once safe are now risky: graphic designers, marketers, some programmers, maybe even lawyers. And surfing the waves of progress to where the world is headed is less risky than you think.\r

Progress comes via surprises, not rules, with inventions no one thought possible. The telescope opened the skies. The microscope illuminated the unseeable. Both surprises. So was Edison’s Kinetograph movie camera. Quantum theory was heretical, until it wasn’t. It enables entire industries, including semiconduc- tors. Gene editing was hard until Crispr technology simplified it. Machine learning was researched for decades with little result, until back-propagation allowed voice and facial recognition. And it’s been less than three years since ChatGPT shocked the world with what it could do. None of these were invented by following the rules, but by coloring outside the lines.\r

Early on, Uber was hit with a cease-and-desist order. I asked co-founder Travis Kalanick, “Did you cease?” “No.” “Did you desist?” “No.” He made his own rules.\r

Take risks. Risk leads to reward. Ignore those who tell you to take “calculated risks.” It’s the magnitude of risk that provides the potential reward. And we need a new name for entrepreneurs. It’s too French. Maybe “risk agents” or “productivity creators” or, hmmm, “no rulers.”\r

Please, don’t embrace mediocrity. Sadly, your public education was dumbed down. Two years ago, Oregon delayed until 2029 a proficiency requirement in reading, writing and math for high-school graduation. Meanwhile, in the heart of Silicon Valley, the Palo Alto Unified School District “delaned”—stopped grouping students by aptitude—dropping honors English and honors biology. Merit be damned. Why? A biology teacher explained, “We know that laning can lead to issues around students’ beliefs in themselves.”\r

Don’t fall into this trap. While your cohorts worry that others aren’t “validating their feelings,” listen to the Terminator and work your back end off to leapfrog them all.\r

Do you need universities? The Financial Times notes that male college graduates have the same jobless rate as those who didn’t get a college degree. Ouch. More than ever, colleges seem like finishing schools, places to mature and get some partying out of your system—plus leave you with crippling six-figure debt and social-justice radicalization.\r

So why go? Since 2011, the Thiel Fellowship has paid smart young people $200,000 over two years to “build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.” I asked Peter Thiel how it was going. He pointed to more than 300 fellows who have created $750 billion in value. Smart people with no rules do great things, including Figma’s Dylan Field, Anthropic’s Chris Olah, Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin, Cognition’s Walden Yan and OYO’s Ritesh Agarwal. Sure, Harvard can point to Microsoft and Meta, worth a combined $5.7 trillion. But Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out.\r

For now, most students should probably go to college, but rule ignoring is trickling down. In July this column wrote about high-agency people using artificial-intelligence tools like Replit and Cursor to solve previously difficult problems without becoming experts. That could be you. It’s the beginning of the end of credentialism. Corporations better start hiring these highagency, rules-ignoring, collegeskipping future makers. Or be left behind.\r

No one knows what’s next. Not your professors. Not futurists. Especially not government. You’ve got the best shot to create the surprise. As Apple Fellow Alan Kay said, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” You’ll make mistakes. Edison tried to build a spirit phone to talk to the dead. You might even fail. So what? If your brain still functions, you can keep going until you find success that surprises the world. There are no rules. Do your thing. Accomplish somep’n.

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