My Advice To 15–18 Year-Olds

Yet Another One

This article represents my reflections on the kind of knowledge that my 26-year-old self could successfully convey to my 16-year-old self — or to a similarly young, promising individual — to radically accelerate their development and improve their chances of fully realizing their potential. This is not an exhaustive list of advice but rather a selection of tips that I rarely come across elsewhere. In other words, these are pieces of advice that might not be found by default.

Of course, there is likely a certain bias here toward the specifics of my own life path and the things I lacked knowledge of at a younger age. These insights might differ for other people; however, based on my experience interacting with many individuals, I believe that this advice could prove useful to a wide range of people.

Without further discussions, let’s get straight into the specifics.

Be Proficient in the Key Components of Productivity

Based on my interactions with people, I have come to see four major components as essential for productivity and the ability to achieve extraordinary outcomes:

1. Intelligence

2. Psychological Stack: traits like agency, energy, perseverance, resilience, patience, etc.

3. Ambition

4. Knowing What to Work On

Each of these qualities is crucial in its own way. Your task is to ensure that you are well-developed in each area and capable of allocating your efforts and resources effectively. This involves:

• Understanding your strengths and weaknesses so you can identify which areas need the most improvement.

• Recognizing how difficult it is to develop each trait and learning the most effective ways to enhance them.

• Grasping the significance of each trait in various contexts and how they contribute to your overall goals.

Intelligence

Developing intelligence is often the most challenging. In some cases, there’s little you can do about it (e.g., having or lacking a natural talent for mathematics), and in others, improving intelligence can require years of dedicated effort. The good news is that while intelligence is undeniably important, incremental increases in intelligence don’t always make a huge difference: a slightly less intelligent person can easily outperform a slightly more intelligent one by working effectively and focusing on the right things. Thus, building your intelligence is a necessary long-term investment, but falling short of the absolute top is not a critical setback. That said, you do need to be intelligent — well above average — to achieve significant results.

Psychological Stack

The psychological stack is arguably the most critical factor in practice. While intelligence may hold greater importance overall, the psychological stack is much easier to develop and refine, making it a more practical and easy area for focus. This stack encompasses a broad range of traits, which is why I use this abstract term. Among these traits, agency is perhaps the most vital. Agency is the ability to act autonomously, take initiative, assume responsibility, and be proactive — in essence, to be a player character rather than a non-player character.

The good news is that the psychological stack can be developed relatively easily by simply “applying effort.” While applying effort may still be difficult, the fact that it’s within your control is encouraging — you can’t become smarter just by willing it, but you can enhance your psychological stack with effort and persistence.

Ambition

Ambition is highly personal and dependent on individual desires and preferences. The idea of “developing ambition” is almost a contradiction, as ambition isn’t something you can simply cultivate — it’s either present or it’s not. Hence, I have nothing to say about ambition besides the fact that it is important.

Knowing What to Work On

Knowing what to work on means understanding which areas in science, technology, or other fields are worth pursuing based on their potential for impact. A trivial example: even if you are the smartest, most energetic, and most ambitious person in the world, directing your efforts toward stamp collecting will not lead to outstanding achievements in terms of meaningful contributions to the world.

While “knowing what to work on” may sound simple, it’s astonishing how few intelligent people act as though they understand this. Perhaps they do know but are unwilling to leave their familiar domain. In that case, this quality should also include the flexibility to change your career focus when necessary to prioritize what matters most.

In Summary:

• Without intelligence, you can accomplish very little overall.
• Without a strong psychological stack, you are mostly destined for a mediocre scientific or engineering career.
• Without ambition, you are bound to settle for a meaningless job, even if it may be high-status.
• Without knowing what to work on, you will devote your efforts to endeavors that fail to make a significant impact on the world, no matter how smart, cool, or impressive those efforts might seem.

Reality Does Not Grade on a Curve

People, especially in educational settings or when chasing social status, often evaluate success in relative terms — either by comparing themselves to others or to their own past achievements. The mantra of “becoming the best version of yourself” has become a standard piece of advice for success, but it is, broadly speaking, a harmful notion.

In many tasks that truly matter — those with real significance for progress, society, survival, or scientific discovery — it doesn’t actually matter whether you’ve become “the best version of yourself” (or better than others). What matters is whether the task has been accomplished in absolute terms. For example, if you are an aircraft engineer, reality doesn’t care whether you’ve built the “best version” of a plane you’re capable of; the plane will crash regardless if it fails to meet certain absolute criteria — in this case, engineering standards.

This principle applies to almost any meaningful work — particularly work outside the confines of education and large bureaucratic organizations. Focusing on “becoming the best version of yourself” can be a distraction from real objectives and, at times, even a dangerous metric. Reality doesn’t care if you’re better or worse — it only cares about your absolute ability to solve problems.

It’s understandable why people avoid thinking this way: it implies there are no guarantees about the outcomes of self-improvement efforts. When results are not graded on a curve, it feels “unfair.” The idea that only absolute results matter is psychologically uncomfortable and even conflicts with some of our ethical beliefs — such as the notion that hard work and other virtues should be rewarded proportionally. Moreover, while this idea is true, it can make traditional education seem more difficult and even inefficient: students thrive when they are rewarded for progress.

As a student, however, you must recognize that success in a university setting does depend on the progress you’ve made — how much you’ve grown and improved. In the real world, this doesn’t matter in and of itself. Outside academia, success is determined not by how far you’ve come from where you started, but by whether you’ve reached critical checkpoints or come close enough to them.

Fortunately, this phenomenon has an upside: in some cases, achieving extraordinary results doesn’t require outperforming others or even pushing yourself to the limit — it simply requires focusing on the right things. That said, such “free lunches” are rare: opportunities to achieve something significant with minimal competition are usually noticed by others as well.

Have a Reasonable Level of Craziness

There’s something like an inverted midwit peak when it comes to craziness: a low level of craziness is bad, a moderate level is good, and a high level is bad again. By craziness, I mean traits such as contrarian thinking, ignoring social norms, defying standard success criteria, disregarding public opinion, challenging common sense, and not taking everything too seriously. The key is finding this “moderate optimum.”

Excessive craziness leads to outright madness. People at this extreme are so disconnected from reality that they lack the grounding to make meaningful contributions or achieve sustainable success. Their contrarian nature becomes a self-destructive force.

On the other hand, having too little craziness is equally problematic. If you are overly dependent on others’ opinions, excessively risk-averse, and rely too much on social proof, you end up stuck in conventional paths. Even if you are intelligent, talented, and ambitious, without a healthy dose of craziness, you’ll likely end up in a comfortable but predictable place — working for a FAANG company or holding a faculty position at a second-tier university. These are respectable outcomes, but they fall short of exceptional impact because all truly effective paths are, by nature, unconventional.

A moderate level of craziness gives you the ability to “think outside the box” (meh), take calculated risks, and challenge societal expectations without veering into impracticality. This balance enables you to pursue unconventional but effective paths that others may overlook or shy away from.

Extrapolate Your Ignorance

If you notice that another person’s opinions consistently turn out to be correct in areas where you were wrong, it might be worth extrapolating this pattern. For example, if Person A was right about X and Y in a particular domain, despite your differing opinions on those matters, and if there’s also a Z in the same domain where you and Person A disagree, you should seriously consider the possibility that Person A is also right about Z. Sometimes, you need to epistemologically surrender.

Imagine watching a chess grandmaster make a move that seems foolish to you. Even if you don’t understand the reasoning, you should acknowledge that the grandmaster likely knows better. Similarly, in domains where someone has demonstrated greater insight or expertise than you, it’s often wiser to defer to their judgment rather than stubbornly clinging to your own conclusions.

This isn’t about blindly appealing to authority — it’s a safeguard against your own arrogance. There’s no virtue in stubbornly maintaining “your own opinion” purely for the sake of independence or signaling your ability to “think for yourself.” Sometimes, it’s better to rely on another person’s expertise or reasoning, even if it means risking the appearance of being a follower in your own eyes.

It’s Okay for Your Failure Rate to Be Very High

Psychologically, frequent failure is uncomfortable for most people. Losing feels unpleasant, and embarrassment can sting. However, from the perspective of success, what matters is not the proportion of wins but the absolute number (and, of course, the quality) of victories. It’s better to attempt 100 times and win 10 than to attempt only 5 times and win all 5.

If you’re winning all the time, it likely means you’re playing at a level that’s too easy for you — a failure in itself. The correct strategy is to consistently push the boundaries of your abilities, raising the difficulty of the challenges you take on until your efforts result in frequent failures. At that point, you can step back slightly to regain balance, but only a small step — just enough to recalibrate before pushing forward again.

Aside from the discomfort, failure often has no real downsides. The fear of embarrassment, while emotionally taxing, usually doesn’t carry lasting consequences. The key is to frame losses not as setbacks but as necessary steps toward achieving meaningful wins.

Find Smart People

This may seem like obvious advice, but what might not be obvious is just how easy it is to accomplish. There are numerous relatively simple ways to meet exceptionally talented individuals — people who, in many respects, appear to be far ahead of you: get into a good university, get to a quality event, internship or hackathon, just find people on the Internet and write to them.

Yes, it really works! Of course, most of your outreach efforts will result in rejections or no responses at all. But, as described in the previous advice, this is not a problem. Among the rejections, you will receive some positive replies. Even if only one out of a hundred messages leads to a meaningful connection, it’s an outstanding outcome — and you will absolutely achieve this result.

I guarantee that if you put in the effort, you will find interesting and talented people who are willing to engage with you — and perhaps even become your friends.

Learn from the Best Sources

This advice can be reframed more broadly as: don’t focus solely on your local surroundings.

No matter where you are, how hard you try, or how exceptional you may be, you will never find yourself in the absolute best, most ideal place in the world for your growth and learning. Your circumstances and surroundings will always include elements of randomness and irrelevance.

People tend to focus heavily on their immediate environment in a broad sense — they consume information from their social media feeds, learn from the teachers in their classes, and interact with their colleagues. While there’s nothing wrong with doing this, it’s crucial to remind yourself that all of this represents only your local surroundings — a partially random and often suboptimal slice of reality.

Even if your environment is excellent, it’s unlikely to be the best possible one. Allowing your growth to be shaped solely by your immediate surroundings limits your potential.

To avoid this trap, continuously seek knowledge and experiences beyond your immediate environment. Orient yourself toward the best that the world has to offer. This could mean:

• Studying from world-renowned experts, even if they aren’t accessible locally.

• Consuming knowledge from global, cutting-edge sources like top research papers, books, or online courses.

• Actively seeking out mentors, collaborators, or role models who operate at the highest level in their field, regardless of where they are located.

Be Highly Selective in What You Learn

This advice builds on the previous one but addresses a slightly different issue. Society tends to encourage a broad range of activities, often rewarding effort without enough attention to its actual value.

From a young age, we are praised for simply doing something:

• A child reads a book? Great — but nobody questions whether it’s the right book.

• A student participates in a competition? Wonderful — but is that the best use of their time and effort?

• They want to become a scientist? Admirable — but should they rethink which field they’re pursuing?

This creates the illusion that you’re always on the right track, even when you aren’t. While any learning is better than none, the problem lies in the severe limitations of your time. Time is so scarce that even if you focus solely on the best of the best, you will still never manage to learn everything worth knowing.

You must be ruthlessly selective in deciding what to learn:

• Is this the best book on the subject?

• Is this the best subject to study right now?

• Is this the best course available?

• Is the person recommending this truly qualified to judge its value?

Without this level of scrutiny, you risk wasting time on suboptimal learning materials, which can cost you not just hours but months or years of potential progress.

It’s easy to convince yourself that you’re being productive when you’re reading a book, especially a challenging or intellectual one. Society reinforces this belief, rewarding the act of learning without questioning its quality or relevance. However, you must always think in terms of opportunity cost: is this truly the best use of my time and energy?

Morevover, the best books, courses, or teachers often provide disproportionately greater results. A single excellent textbook on a subject might not be just twice as effective as a mediocre one — it could be 50 times better.

Avoid Benchmarks

Formal benchmarks occasionally play an important role — sometimes even an essential one — but these cases are extremely rare. One notable exception is meeting the benchmarks required for admission to a top university, such as high school grades for undergraduate programs or undergraduate performance for graduate or PhD programs.

Outside such scenarios, benchmarks are largely irrelevant when your focus is on achieving exceptional outcomes and making meaningful contributions.

Yes, good grades can help you land a slightly better job, and a high h-index might secure a slightly better postdoc position. But if your goal is not “slightly better” but exceptionally better, benchmarks usually hold little value — and often have a negative impact, particularly when used as goals.

For instance, setting goals like “read N books this year” or “visit N countries” is actively harmful because it shifts focus toward optimizing for metrics that have no intrinsic significance. This is part of a broader principle: maximizing aggregated numerical indicators rarely leads to meaningful success.

There are a few benchmarks that do have genuine importance, such as how much money you have or what is your biological age. However, these benchmarks are exceptions, not the rule.

If not benchmarks, then what? Orienting yourself toward quality over quantity is inherently more complex and abstract — and that’s precisely why people gravitate toward numerical benchmarks. They provide a sense of structure and clarity, even if it’s misleading.

Unfortunately, there’s no simple recipe to replace benchmarks. Instead, you must dedicate significant thought and effort to defining meaningful goals that are grounded in real outcomes. It sounds too abstract, yes. Because there is no royal way.

Avoid Hypertrophied Competition

Competition and competitive environments are necessary, but there’s no value in trying to maximize them. Overemphasizing competition creates unnecessary problems and distracts from meaningful progress.

Overcompetition is a problem due to:

1. Benchmark Dependence: As discussed previously, focusing on competition often leads to optimizing for formal benchmarks — grades, rankings, or other metrics — that may not align with genuine achievement or meaningful outcomes.

2. Unnecessary Bottlenecks: Highly competitive environments (Harvard, investment banking, Google, whatever) often represent bottlenecks that are more about signaling status than achieving extraordinary results. Many paths to significant impact lie outside these narrow funnels of extreme competitiveness.

Bottlenecks of extreme competition tend to encourage focusing on outperforming peers based on formal criteria. This diverts energy and attention away from the actual work and results that truly matter. Ironically, the most impressive outcomes are systematically achieved outside these high-pressure environments.

Find the Optimum Point on the Generalist/Specialist Curve

There are inherent temptations in both extremes. As a generalist, it’s easy to avoid diving deeply into any one subject, which feels comfortable but ultimately leaves you without a strong foundation. As a specialist, you can immerse yourself in an artificially narrow domain, where it’s relatively easy to excel but which often lacks broader relevance.

Both extremes are traps, and it’s important to strike a balance.

The ideal approach is to be a generalist with one or more deep specializations. This allows you to maintain breadth while cultivating expertise in specific areas where you can provide unique value.

The truth is that general knowledge alone won’t make you valuable. To be in demand, you must have distinctive expertise or talent in at least one area. At the same time, the truth is that regardless of how deep your specialization is, achieving great work requires stepping beyond the boundaries of your field.

Use Prior Probabilities

Fighting against prior probabilities is like swimming upstream. You can do it, but why make things harder for yourself? In some cases, the current is so strong that no amount of effort will get you where you want to go. Instead, aim to align your actions with favorable prior probabilities to maximize your chances of success.

Prior probabilities reflect the baseline likelihood of success in a given situation or context. By aligning yourself with situations where the odds are already in your favor, you make it easier to achieve your goals.

• Starting a startup? Do it where most startups are founded — like Silicon Valley. The ecosystem, resources, and networks significantly increase your chances of success.

• Planning your education? Look at people with similar educational paths. Have they achieved outcomes comparable to what you aspire to? If not, reconsider.

Position yourself in distributions where the prior probability of success is high.

Be aware: while aligning with prior probabilities provides a significant advantage, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for success. However, treating prior probabilities as a “tailwind” makes success more achievable and reduces unnecessary resistance.