So in procrastinating my other hw i’ve decided to write another blog post. Hopefully it’ll be short-ish and I dont waste too much time here.
Inspired by some of Evan Chen’s writing.
I often see a lot of people go around saying that who-and-who did WXYZ in high school, which is usually some combination of academics, olympiads, research, founding startups, nonprofits, internships, whatever.
And people are like “how are these people so cracked” “i wish i could do that” etc. But they’re missing the point.
Say, once you get out of high school, how much of this is really going to matter? Most certainly, stuff like academics and other stuff related to school won’t matter at all, nobody cares. But really, nobody really cares if you have an IOI medal, or published 5 papers, or made a startup (unless it works out, but when’s the last time that happened?). Even if you don’t go to MIT, people still don’t really care if you have an olympiad medal (empirically true). And if you are at MIT, you probably have several olympiad gold medalist friends, so it doesn’t really matter either.
And what you do probably isn’t going to have a large impact. Sure, you might have a small impact (which may indeed make something worth doing), but it probably won’t be as large as you think.
So if they don’t really matter, why do people do such things?
Perhaps the most commonly cited reason is for college applications. Well such things do not matter that much for college applications, and what college you go to does not matter that much anyway. But it is enough for people to do it for college applications.
Well if you do genuinely do such things for college applications (and people do this), good for you, you probably just spent a ton of time doing something you don’t care about, just to have a small chance at getting into a better college. You will gain experience points along the way (more on that later), but perhaps such XP is not as valuable if you don’t really like what you do anyway.
One other thing people do for this is to try to cheat and game the system. This comes in many forms, from literally cheating on tests (one of my friends told me about someone pulling out their apple watch during aime; i did not qualify lol), to less obvious things such as buying research, publishing low-quality research, making fake NPOs, whatever. This also creates a “market of lemons” type thing where colleges can’t really trust said achievements. But enough about college. Doing this gives you no XP (perhaps, negative XP).
Other reasons to do things include reasons such as learning, or for fun, or because you like doing so. Which are all great reasons, of course.
But perhaps the biggest benefit of doing, like almost anything, in HS (or in general) is to gain knowledge and experience. High school is a great time to do random things and fail (or succeed). And really, the biggest thing that you’re going to take away from high school is whatever you learn, which is your knowledge and XP.
And perhaps one of the best ways to gain xp is to literally do things. and this should be the real reason to do anything in high school. and really what you gain from a lot of high school is the ability to sit down and grit through something. what you achieved is really not that important, the important part is that you tried. and more importantly, that you tried hard.
And you should try hard even knowing that you probably won’t achieve anything, and that it probably won’t matter, and you’ll probably fail. Because this gets you a lot of experience, and if you can work without expecting success, you can work on almost anything. Not that you can expect success from working on literally anything. But at least you can try. This is how you gain XP. And the more experience you gain, the easier this becomes.
And it is also worth noting that the more variety of things you try, the more XP you gain.
One last thing that I should note is that you shouldn’t restrict yourself to what everyone else is doing (probably for college). If you like physics, maybe you should just try to learn general relativity instead of doing olympiads, if it interests you. Or take an algebraic topology course for fun. Or if you want to become an engineer maybe you should go fix some cars instead of spending time taking classes and whatever.
Because all these things will land you XP, and at the end of the day will probably matter more than you think. At least more than whatever you write on your college applications.
