Advice · Patrick Collison

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

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.

practice coming up with your own worldview.

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

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

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.

Make friends over the internet with people who are great at things you're interested in. The internet is one of the biggest advantages you have over prior generations. Leverage it.

To the extent that you enjoy working hard, do.

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.