Maria Popova

And instead I find myself in this...

factory model of education with the 400-person lecture hall and the PowerPoint slides.

And very quickly, I realized, oh, no, they're going to teach me how to take standardized tests.

This is what's happening here in order to be a better cog in the corporate machine later.

And I just felt so betrayed, and I felt so stuck.

And I was working so hard for this very unsatisfying education.

So then I started...

Just going to the library at night on my own, blindly trying to figure out where those answers were.

I would like pull down Aristotle and Susan Sontag.

I'd never heard of who was this person.

And I just sort of cobbled it together and I kept a record of what I was reading.

So meanwhile, one of my four jobs was at this little creative agency.

This was in Philadelphia.

That's where I lived my first bit in the U.S.

The agency was founded by a wonderful man named Steve O'Connell, who had become very famous very young because he had conducted the first effective anti-smoking campaign in history.

The Truth Campaign.

I don't know if you remember from the American Legacy Foundation.

It's very smart, which is that all previous anti-smoking campaigns used fear appeal.

Don't do this.

Bad things are going to happen.