Folks, stop studying. Stop memorizing the names of complex protein structures. Stop calculating the effect of price control in oligopolistic economies. Stop analyzing the use of satire in classical literature. Close all your textbooks and tell your university you refuse to pay it another penny. Instead, I’ll tell you what you should do. You should slip into your sweats and your white Nikes, grab the ball from where it’s gathering dust in the back of your closet, and run over to the local basketball court. Statistically, you’ll make more money this way.

Think about it. Your professor, who spends hours teaching you valuable skills--how to think about humanity, how to aid in the creation of new technologies, how to calculate the value of a multivariable integral--well, he makes an average salary of about $114,134 annually. Yet the famous American basketball player Kobe Bryant is paid $30,453,000 to toss a ball around to his teammates and shoot it into a hoop.

Even the country's most influential people are out of luck. Our renowned former president, Barack Obama, spent his days dealing with national crises. He proposed legislation to reform health care, to create jobs, and to bring the country out of the economic rut it was trapped in. For all this, he got paid a pretty substantial $400,000 annual salary. Yet the American golfer Tiger Woods is given $78.1 million to spend his days playing with a stick.

What about the people to whom we owe our lives? What about the doctors and nurses working in the country's hospitals? What about the pediatrician who gave us our flu shot and saved us from the epidemic or the EMT who resurrected us after a life-taking cardiac arrest? Well, the truth is that the average general practitioner earns about $173,175 per year, and the neurosurgeon, who operates on our brains, gets paid $219,770. Doctors save our lives, and they earn this much. But Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao earns $34,000,000 for beating people up.

The average American worker, after spending hours typing on desktop computers inside a cramped little office cubicle, earns a median salary of $50,700. Yet the Spanish racing star Fernando Alonso gets paid $30 million to waste the nation's finite resources by driving around in circles and Jamaican track star Usain Bolt gets paid $24.2 million to run.

So if you’re thinking about becoming a doctor, don’t. If you’re thinking about becoming a lawyer, don’t. An engineer? A politician? A journalist? A teacher? Don’t waste your time. Instead, pack up you bags and head on over to basketball camp and one day, you’ll be worth more than the rest of us.