Success Manifesto

Today, I was thinking about how various subjects such as creative writing, economics, history, international relations, etc. are interesting to me now. At the same time, I realized that I had taken these various courses at some point during my 15+ year school career. Even though I passed these classes, mostly with fairly good grades, I either joked around in them or did not take them seriously, mostly because I did not find them interesting or relevant.

If I had to do everything over again (assuming I was a super learner), I would...

1. Focus almost completely on finding the right teacher/mentor for my passions and apply their knowledge to real-world projects. For example, when learning to write, I would have tried to write publishable work. When learning about sciences, I would have wanted to create my own experiments based on questions I developed from my experiences in the world.
   
2. Actively seek out mentors who were scientists, authors, and professionals using pre-teen boyish charm.
   
3. Go an alternative, unconventional school or be unschooled/homeschooled.
   
4. Focus on building a like-minded community of peers that I would have long-term relationships with.
   
5. Start a business earlier.
   
6. Start reading self-development books earlier.
   
7. Find an invigorating learn/work/have fun balance that I could sustain and improve upon for the rest of my life.

1. Give work in a way that it doesn't feel like work.
   
2. Make what they're teaching relevant, an extension of one's life and not something that we may or may not use in a future career.
   
3. Make a subject really interesting often because they themselves are obsessed with it.
   
4. Care more about teaching then about following standardized rules.
   
5. Know how to control a class without ever yelling.