High school is hard to get right. I’m a couple years out now, but I think I have some concrete insights on capitalizing on the opportunities that high school provides.
My goal with this post is to give some advice on how to heighten your trajectory as an individual. It is in my best interest to give good advice because this could lead to massive impact on the world.
Note
Much of this advice is tuned towards Canada and specifically Westwood Community High School. For context, I was an ambitious high school student interested in technology (see website for more info). Most of this advice will not apply if you are not ambitious, but it may still apply if you are not interested in technology.
A lot of this is advice I have to keep telling myself to this day. After re-reading this, this advice seems quite arrogant, which I did not mean to be. If you disagree with a lot written here, check out the links at the bottom of the article for more experienced perspectives.
To Parents
Originally, this section was quite opinionated, but a friend reminded me that I am not a parent (thanks Dhvani).
Strictness and forcing things will not make your child exceptional, however it will probably assure socioeconomic stability; decide what path you want to focus on. This article is for the former. Another prerequisite is trust. If you do not have trust in your child, I would urge to you build that first before doing heavy decision-making. Without trust, your incentives may not be aligned, and that is how conflict arises.
This article dives deep into the childhood of exceptional people. There are a couple of themes that emerge in their childhood:
- They were given or made exceptional social environments. They often had access to many books, highly skilled adults, and were treated seriously from a young age.
- They had a lot of time and were bored often. The interests where they would grow up to excel were usually first encountered during these hours of solitude. Their passions arose like a wild hallucination induced by overdosing on boredom.
- They had lots of freedom to explore their interests.
- They were doing meaningful work while shadowing “the greats”. This happens less often in todays world where everyone is obsessed with themselves, but important to note regardless.
The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.
- my favorite Einstein quote
All this being said, the best way to help is to be a resource agreggator. Find and introduce opportunities to your kids. This could be classes, programs, projects, or introductions. The idea is to craft an exceptional environment for them without forcing things against their will.
Secondly, reconsider the amount of freedom you give to your kid. I won’t tell you how to parent, but I am constantly grateful for the amount of freedom I got. I had the ability to stay up late at night, travel across the world, and skip school whenever I wanted to. This doesn’t only apply to doing productive things, it goes both ways. Freedom gives responsibility, ownership, independence, and a space to take risks. It is important to start building these traits now.
If you are still reading this, please send this article to your kid now. My advice for you is done.
General Advice About Youth
Find your ”why""
First and foremost, I ask you to start justifying the way that you are living life right now. If you are in a certain track, or program, or club, ask yourself why. This is the time in your life that you will have to make life altering decisions and I suggest that you try to do it with conviction, otherwise you will fall victim to the compounding effect of lazy-decision-making.
A good rule is to be able to go ~5 levels deep in reasoning about strong opinions that you hold. In other words, if I asked “why” 5 times as you kept giving justification about one of your opinions, could you hold up?
This will form your basis for decision making for the rest of your life. This step is also the hardest, and will take the most amount of time. Don’t let it paralyze you though, continue “going with the flow” but be sure to spend time to figure this out. The goal is to be intentional and practical with how you spend your time.
Make your story
Be unique. Craft a narrative for yourself. A story that has a beginning, middle, and hopeful end. You should be able to enthusiastically convey your story such that strangers will turn into personal stakeholders. This means that the story must be truthful and close to your heart.
Your story will come useful in many ways. You can use it to answer the ”who are you” question. You can use it to garner support and give people a reason to take bets on you. Eventually, you will find peace in your own story and enjoy watching as it unfolds before you.
Be truly ambitious
Hone in on your ambition. Oftentimes, when nothing is going right, this is all you will have to keep going. This ambition will result in uniqueness, which will be beneficial in all aspects of life.
To be truly ambitious is to aim and act towards the impossible. Start thinking about scale and impact. Usually people regard these concepts as locally or provincially, but contemplate what things would be like if you considered your work at the national or global level. Focusing on large impact will take care of the small impact for you. Sure, it’s cool to start a school tutoring club, but maybe there is more impact to be made elsewhere.
Join communities
Another key aspect of being ambitious is surrounding yourself with ambitious people. Some of the biggest bottlenecks that you are likely to face are not knowing where to look and not knowing what is possible. Communities solve both of these issues. Consider joining The Knowledge Society, Socratica, Hack Club, or even Twitter (there are lots of great communities here). These communities can become a strong part of your social life.
You can also have local communities, but it can be very hard to find ambitious people nearby. I was very lucky to have this, but do not fret if you don’t. Ambitious communities need an initial stakeholder. Be that person.
This article doesn’t touch on social life much, but that’s because extraordinary people have unordinary social lives. It will be very difficult to be ambitious while surrounding yourself unambitous people. Assemble the Avengers. If you can’t find them, try to create some.
Understand the power of compounding
Compounding is often talked about a lot in financial terms. Investing regularly in a stable market overtime will compound into gargantuan sizes. The most reliable thing you can invest in should be yourself. Spend time doing what you are passionate about every day, and you will soon become an industry expert.
It might be hard to find what you’re truly passionate about. That is okay. Spend time learning about things you find interesting. Ensure to get a deep understanding and never find bliss in ignorance.
Utilize the power of your youth
You have two significant advantages of being young. Firstly, you have a lot of time. And secondly, people intrinsically want you to win.
Ensure that you are using your time very wisely and do not find yourself doing things that you seldom care for. My strategy was to bring my laptop with me wherever I went. I would often spend time in class or at events doing my own work on my laptop. Elon Musk walks out of meetings as soon as he doesn’t find it useful.
Find people to be in your corner. Usually they will be resource aggregators. That is, they will be experts at connecting you with resources or quests to continue your adventure. If you are technical in nature, I highly suggest that you befriend a professor in your chosen field. Professors love high school students.
I believe you should utilize the power of the internet. Email or message anyone that you believe could potentially play a part in your journey. You’d be surprised at how many people care to reply. It’s very easy to get caught up in local trends, but it is essential to get external perspective as a young person. If you are from a small city, this rings especially true.
The world is very malleable
There are lots of ways to do things; be resourceful. Refuse to be blocked. I really liked this quote from “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch:
The brick walls are there for a reason. They’re not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something… The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.
Most brick walls will be rules or people. Use your judgement to ethically break rules or find loopholes. Some rules don’t matter and others don’t make sense. Similarly, there will be some people that give you a hard time. Learn when to move on or double down on these people. Be persuasive.
Creativity and ideas
There is a popular misconception in the high school world that creativity is an unimprovable skill. Many tell me that they are just unable to come up with good ideas; I used to be like this too. You must internalize that these are trainable skills, just like math or basketball.
To become more creative, you must introduce yourself to more intellectual stimulus. That is, you have to go through a lot of content. Youtube videos are great but written content is often dense with ideas and stimulus for your brain to spin off of.
Perhaps the best ideation vehicle is conversation. It’s easier to have a great conversation than a great idea. That is also why you should share your ideas—it will make the idea better. Very few people care enough to steal it, and most who care enough to steal it, care enough to work with you on it!
You must also understand that a good idea doesn’t have to be completely unique. Starting to work on an idea with only a few incremental improvements compared to the norm will quickly spiral into many more ideas. Do not paralyze yourself over a lack of creativity. Try to stimulate your creative mind by reading, conversing, or introspecting.
My recommendation is to start reading. It doesn’t have to be a specific type of literature. It could be articles, blog posts, research papers, story books, or non-fiction novels. The point is to understand that ideas are all around you, and it’s not hard to have your own.
Additionally you should keep a running log of all your ideas. Do not worry about their attainability or timeliness. As soon as you have an idea, write it down. You will be surprised by how many you have.
Writing
The ability to write well will become in very useful. Writing well doesn’t necessarily mean that you score high marks at school, but it means that you can convey ideas with brevity and gravitas. Understand that being a good writer means that you have to find your “voice”. This will take time, but please keep practicing.
Similarly to creativity, many believe that writing skill can not be improved. This is untrue. Practise reading and writing often. I guarantee that this will improve your ability by a lot.
Move fast and break things
I think it is completely valid to join all the clubs and do all the projects. Just don’t be afraid to quit things when you realize that it isn’t the right fit. You will know this when you realize that there is no transfer of value between yourself and the commitment. At that point it becomes a waste of time. Eventually you should be focusing the majority of your time on a couple of things.
By doing everything, you will maximize your surface area for opportunity. This can be a great thing, but please remember this:
Creating and sharing
All of this advice should probably be realized in something that you can show the world. This is where impact can start being created. Start building things and applying what you have learned. Some ideas of what you can create are:
- Art portfolio
- Invention
- Essay
- Startup
- Website
- Research paper
- Short film
- Tutorial
- Youtube channel
You should also share your creations with as many people as possible. Share them with pride on the internet! Ensure to showcase your hard work to your friends, teachers, and mentors. Showing your creations to people won’t just give you validation, but it will act as proof of work for the future. This proof of work is what will inspire people to take chances on you.
It is easy to be ashamed of your own work, especially considering you should be your own hardest critic. Spend your mind-space on perfecting your craft, and don’t focus on what others will think. If you consistently share your work for the reasons above, things are bound to go well.
I’ve talked a lot about being given opportunities, but it is important to note that it is possible (and recommended) to create your own opportunities. Usually this will require a vision and great foresight, but do know that being a self-starter is a prime quality of impactful people.
School tips
Marks
The sad truth is that you need to maximize the grades you get while minimizing the time you spend on schoolwork that you don’t care for. I won’t mention general learning techniques here, but I think it is worth considering your efficiency as a learner.
If you are applying to Canadian universities, the only times that your marks matter are in grade 11, and the first semester of grade 12. Depending on your confidence in your own learning ability, be prepared to sacrifice your grades in all other timeframes for the ability to do other more impactful work instead.
Classes
Prioritize the classes with the best teachers. Usually these are the AP/IB classes, but talk to upper years to get a better sense. For justification, read Taking AP Classes.
Take non-essential classes over the summers if there isn’t anything stopping you from it. I did the entirety of social studies over summer school.
Online classes are very underrated as well. Ask your school staff about how to register, but it will save a lot of time. I did our manditory “Career and Life Management” class there, but I probably could have done more (especially in grade 10).
Teachers
Teachers are very wise and will often be your greatest supporters. Make sure to befriend teachers, it will make high school life significantly more fun.
Do not fear asking regrades, remarks, etc. Be creative with how you can improve your grade and propose it to your teacher; they usually have your best interest in mind. Build great persuasion skills for this.
Fearlessly asking questions in class is a great method to learn efficiently. In physics, I would briefly check in with what the teacher was saying every 15 minutes and ask about anything I didn’t understand. Even if the question seemed stupid. This saved a lot of time.
Gaming the system
A lot of the time, you are doing very useless things in class. Stuff that doesn’t help you learn at all. Perhaps it is busy work, or perhaps you already know the concepts. Figure out how to game the system. After all, the world is very malleable.
For example, during online school I programmed a bot to automatically go to all my classes and spoof a video of myself. As a result, I didn’t do school for ~6 months in high school. In person, I brought my laptop to every class to work on anything but schoolwork.
AI tools like ChatGPT are also your friend here.
Extracurriculars
Only do extracurriculars that you find fun. The reality is if you don’t like a certain club, you won’t gain anything from it and will not be able to write a great story around it for your university applications either.
Doing extracurriculars is also a great way to build a relationship with teachers.
Have at least one extra curricular that you can greatly excel in and which you believe that you can generate massive impact from taking part in. For me, this was science fair. Going to nationals was eye-opening.
Constantly be applying to internships, fellowships, councils, awards, etc. Only do this if they relate to your mission in life. Joining an RCMP council as a technically focused student will not be beneficial.
University
Chances are that you want to go to a good university. I agree that you should give it a chance.
Canadian universities mostly care about grades, but I think it can be beneficial to have great written answers to questions. This a great reason to make your story and become a good writer.
Avoid platitudes and common praises in your university applications. Instead, try and cut deep. Show that you have done your research, and have found yourself. Bring up specific facts that only a passionate individual would know. Consider using extended metaphors or any other fun literary device to add some core meaning to your life.
I’d also suggest taking the AP exams for courses you don’t want to do in university. These credits transfer and you can skip these course requirements in university which will be a massive time saver. Waterloo doesn’t support this unfortunately.
Check out So you want to go to Waterloo
Additional tips
Treat school as a makerspace. They will often have resources that will allow you to experiment with anything you are passionate about. Be adamant to the staff at your school if there is a project that you need assistance in pursuing.
The End
A lot of this advice probably seems like common sense, but it is very difficult to internalize it. You are likely to continue making mistakes, occasionally feeling lost, and having a lot questions. That is okay! These things are a part of life, and you should find peace in knowing that it affects everyone in the world regardless of their age. Honestly it is a good sign that you are feeling these things—it means you care.
Okay, that’s it! There are a lot of things to think about here, but start thinking of some practical ways you will act on this (hopefully) newfound inspiration you have. I hope this helps :)
For better resources on how to take advantage of your youth, check out the following links: