Advice · Patrick Collison

practice coming up with your own worldview.

If you think something is important but people older than you don't hold it in high regard, there's a reasonable chance that you're right and they're wrong.

Go deep on things. Become an expert. In particular, try to go deep on multiple things.

If you're 10–20: These are prime years!

Make sure that the things you're pursuing are weird things that you want to pursue, not whatever the standard path is. Heuristic: do your friends at school think your path is a bit strange? If not, maybe it's too normal.

By all means make friends but being weird as a teenager is generally good.

If you're 20–30: I don't know yet. I plan to think about this when I'm 35-40.

One of the main things you should try to achieve by age 20 is some sense for which kinds of things you enjoy doing. This probably won't change a lot throughout your life and so you should try to discover the shape of that space as quickly as you can.

Make things. Operating in a space with a lot of uncertainty is a very different experience to learning something.

To the extent that you enjoy working hard, do.