An A+ student’s rating of 14 years in school
3 Key Lessons from a Traditional Education System
The school system is not formally designed to help you discover your passions. It’s sad but true, passion is something you will be searching for all throughout life, and the best part is that you can love doing multiple things!
This article covers the three biggest things I learned throughout elementary, high school, and my 6 months in (TKS) The Knowledge Society’s Innovate program, all from various teachers, coaches, and mentors.
1. If you don’t know, you won’t be choosing
None of these passions you discover will matter, and some may be never found without good old self-reflection. George Harrison said it best…
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
~TKS program director & George Harrison
There is immense pressure on students and young people to know what they want to do after school and for the rest of their lives. Still, it is unavoidable to live in constant states of uncertainty.
However, most of us, young people, spend too much time feeling stressed over not knowing about the wrong things. We are not supposed to know exactly what to do after high school, but we do need to have an idea of what we want to accomplish or spend most of our time on leading up to graduation.
For example, do you want to make and keep lots of friends, be the best in a particular academic subject area, or do you want to get really good at guitar? The reality is you can experience, do, make, play, and build, anything as much as you want, but if you have no intention for your actions you will be walking around in circles.
Without intention, you simply cannot progress. You may get a little lucky with a few successes, but most luck comes from the work you put in, and the better you can do something the more serendipity you can create for yourself. So, without intention, you will end up following any path you come across hoping something will give you the perfect answer.
That is basically what I did for most of my 14 years of schooling, I knew that I liked chocolate, building things, and that was about it. I had no idea what I wanted to do, build, where to go, or anything else about myself. Thus, when I left elementary school and began high school, I was immediately placed in the lowest-level math class. But I knew I didn’t want to stay there so I took as many math courses as possible to increase 1 level each year to achieve acceptance into the AP math stream. I still hate math but I hated the feeling more of uselessness that I had while sleeping through all these classes out of boredom due to not being challenged academically.
Know what you want, so you don’t end up forming goals based on everyone else’s.
~Business-entrepreneurship teacher
It’s okay to be clueless because life is supposed to be chaotic. But you can’t just sit around expecting a new-found passion to appear like magic to you on a shiny gold horse, you need to go out and search for things too. Without providing yourself opportunities for exploration you will automatically follow the easiest, most clear path which is the one laid out by someone else.
You may not know what you’re looking for, but the road is already under your feet, so just try what’s already in front of you.
~Physics teacher
You never truly know what you don’t know. So, the best thing I have found to do when you are bored and lost is to try everything. Explore new people, places, and ideas in order to discover what you find fascinating, the people you find annoying, or the topics you hate with a burning passion (for me that’s microeconomics).
At this moment in time, the 21st century, we have the most information available to us that we have ever had and it is only increasing, so do anything you can to expose yourself to something new every single day: newsletters, podcasts, your local library, magazines, the radio, daily morning news, and community activity programs.
2. Sacrifices are just as important as knowing
“One half of knowing what you want is knowing what you must give up before you get it.”
~ Sidney Howard
This past semester I got my first 70% grade after three years of high school 90’s, and the best part is that I literally planned for it.
This final year of high school I planned for a lower grade even before I got my university offers. I knew I didn’t care anymore about the things I used to spend all of my waking hours on such as high school chemistry, biology, or even calculus, as much as I cared about my new passions projects. What I did care about was building and learning new things. Things that kept me up at night, things where I didn’t have to be marked or tested on for each plume of smoke that blew up my face.
Because of this decision, I made a lot of heart-breaking sacrifices in order to work on my passions such as passing up time with family, lab internships, invitations to tech conferences, and even fully participating in the AP Calculus course I had been working my butt off since 14 years old, grade 9, to get entry into.
The other half of knowing what you want is trying, doing research, and examining your life for the things you find most important in order to decide what you truly want to spend the most time on. Many self-help writers give numerous examples and methods to do so and one of those I have found to explain it the best is Mark Manson. His book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, is a great example.
If you want something bad enough, you have to be willing to give up things you love most.
~English teacher
You can’t just want something, you need to want it enough to invest time into it. And if you are not even willing to sacrifice some of your ME TIME, then this new-found passion is probably just not that important and you’re wasting your time.
Life is made of tradeoffs. For those who have many passions and those who think you have no passions whatsoever, I deeply empathize with you. Struggling through elementary school when I had no passions and then through high school when I had too many passions, I have found that no matter how badly you want things, you can’t have them all.
Even if you try your hardest, on a full-time basis to do multiple things at once in a short time period, you will certainly fail at giving each project, hobby, or interest all of the attention you expected. But I believe this is an important lesson to experience multiple times throughout life, and there is no reason to not try. As juggling multiple interests provides you with the invaluable experience of the before and after making difficult decisions, time management, and resilience to continue moving forward.
3. Guard your goals and dreams, they are yours
Your goals, values, mindsets are what you want them to be.
~Math teacher
Your goals, values, and dreams are yours and no one else’s, so it takes a while to figure out what you want them to be.
Modifying what you want and are in order to fit in with those around you only silences your truth, makes you miserable, and wastes your time. It’s a loose 3x situation.
When will you put the same time into yourself and your dreams that you do for others’ goals?
~TKS program director
When I joined The Knowledge Society (TKS) in my final few years of high school, I thought I wanted to speak on stage. I spent weeks giving talks, back-to-back weekly presentations — all of them really sucked too. After a while, I realized I truly didn’t want to speak on stage, not because I really sucked, but because it felt draining, like a big chore I constantly procrastinated on.
Even though speaking on big stages at 16 sounds cool, I found most of my happiness & excitement about the world when I was building software and physical plant fuel cells, and talking with the general public, scientists, activists, and entrepreneurs about their problems. Then I could use my own building skills to solve them.
