What You'll Wish You'd Known - speech written for high schoolers by Paul Graham

"I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life. People are always asking you this, so you think you're supposed to have an answer. But adults ask this mainly as a conversation starter. They want to know what sort of person you are, and this question is just to get you talking. They ask it the way you might poke a hermit crab in a tide pool, to see what it does.

If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you do."
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You may be thinking, we have to do more than get good grades. We have to have extracurricular activities. But you know perfectly well how bogus most of these are. Collecting donations for a charity is an admirable thing to do, but it's not hard. It's not getting something done. What I mean by getting something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to draw the human face from life. This sort of thing rarely translates into a line item on a college application.

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Sage words of advice from essayist, programmer, and programming language designer Paul Graham. The above is an excerpt from a talk that he was supposed to give at a high school, but it never transpired because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite him. Dumb ass school officials. The last paragraph I snipped is right on the money. Really enjoying something for the most selfish, beautiful reason. You love it. That is what careers can be built on, not parroting back drivel memorized from a book.

Hopefully the students got to read this, hit the link to read the full text, very insightful. Part of what makes it so good is that it talks to, not down, the target audience. I think there is something useful to be gleaned by a wide age range from this speech.