School just sucked. I was popular in school but still hated it and everyone knew I hated it. Every teacher said how college was different and shit. Well I dropped out of two colleges and joining a trade union was the best thing I've ever done.

Adhd didn't exist back then.

Literature Review. God, scientific papers are so bloody dull to read.

Grade 12. Absolute waste of time. Like... "I taught myself HTML/JS/CSS, instead of listening" levels of a waste of time.

Not day dreaming or doodling in class, and doing homework.

Hardest class - teacher straight up lied to us and failed 80% of the class on a test. Did it again next test. Didn't give the slightest shit about any of us Dr Richard lastname, you were truly a Dick. It's been 20 years and I still hate you.

Hardest thing - finding a job. School did not teach me how to actually find a job. Just told to network. What does that mean? It means network. Fucking hated them.

Foreign languages. Never got a handle on it.

Now, with Google Translate and AI I don't have to!

Art and music class in middle school. Literally useless. Fortunately, we no longer do such useless classes in high school. I pretty much lived my life through middle school without friends, so I hated the art class even more because we sometimes got grouped together to make some "art".

Getting off work in time to make it to class.

The hardest part for me was the way the criteria for success changed between high school and college.

I aced high school because high school requires one to be smart. But I barely scraped by in college because college requires self-organization and discipline.

Nobody really sat me down and raised the flag on how bad my habits were, before college. The message I always got was about how “gifted” I was and how the world would be my oyster because I’m so smart.

The only person really striving to teach me discipline in high school was my track and cross country coach. For that I’m eternally grateful, because it could have been a lot worse.

But most of my adult life has been spent struggling to develop consistent output, struggling to keep promises, struggling to show up consistently.

Don’t know if that’s gotten better since I was a kid, but if I could change one thing it would be to do a lot more to train kids to fit into a structure where others are relying on them to deliver things on time. To keep working when things get hard, and not to rest too heavily on being “smart” as a plan for future success.

Smart is like 1% of success. The rest is conscientiousness.

Dealing with dumb people, fuck.. that was awful.