Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

1. Follow actively the lessons.

2. Study and exercise every day what you covered in the previous lessons

Every one of us has been given these age old platitudes, but, as spaced repetition, testing, and active recall prove, they are actually an excellent starting point for good performance

Some of them just got it, absorbed good advice like a sponge, rejected bad advice, and did their best. They were unsurprisingly successful in life (for their own definitions of success, which wasn't always monetary)

The most frustrating cases were the students who got baited by angry internet advice. Reddit was a frequent source of bad advice. Some got pulled into 4Chan or Something Awful (depending on the era). Others were in weird IRC channels or Discords. All of them got poisoned by cynical online junk. I'd hear the weirdest things about how they'd rationalize that studying was bad, degrees were useless, and nothing mattered. Some tried to lecture me on how the world was ending, the economy was collapsing, and therefore nothing mattered anyway.

The hardest type for me to mentor were the students who had a bottomless bucket of excuses to pull from for everything in their life. Nothing was ever their fault, even if their failure was unambiguously traceable back to their lack of studying. It was always the fault of their professor, their roommate, their parents, their students, their friends, or even their mentors (me) because they had trained themselves to find someone or something to blame in every situation. Not surprisingly they were always failing to progress in life until they hit some situation that forced self-reflection and learning. Some of them managed to turn it around, but I can still find many of them angrily ranting into LinkedIn or other social media to this day.

Mentoring was hard. It was rewarding to work with the students who wanted to learn and knew how to prefer good advice over bad. For some it felt like most of the battle was just keeping them away from bad influences and resisting the urge to run to Reddit to find something that helped them believe nothing was their fault.

Once I graduated from college and started working that completely changed for me, because I finally for the first time had some semblance of agency and real stakes in my life, and wasn't forced to spend all my time with other people my age who were just as lacking in real perspective and experience. Someone gave me real responsibility over something actually pretty important, I could speak up and do and change things in ways that weren't explicitly decided for me ahead of time, it wasn't all just a game anymore.

Being a student is essentially modeled as a zero-sum audition for the real world that is simultaneously extremely low stakes (nobody else really cares about what you're doing) and high stakes (if you fail you could seriously harm your future life). You live completely at the whim of institutions with deadlines and gameable processes. The students who seemed legitimately happy to me were either the ones who didn't feel the same kind of pressure to succeed or those who legitimately found it meaningful to participate in school clubs and work professors for higher grades (go to all their office hours to get help with homework, argue for higher grades). Of course there was fun to be had too but the entire environment is engineered for cynicism, it forces you into a ghetto of inexperience and helplessness.

That is not to say that cynicism is good, and obviously the students who used it as an excuse not to learn or take accountability for their own actions or lack thereof were seriously harming themselves. But I do not think it is entirely irrational, given their perspective of the world as one in which they have very little agency and the rules are almost all artificial, to perceive it that way.