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goobster  ·  2779 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What should teenagers spend their time doing?

Get out. High school is a petri dish of insecurity and petty squabbling that has absolutely no material value in the real world. There ain't NOBODY outside the grounds of your high school that gives two shits about anything you did there.

So focus. Do your work. Submit everything on time and completely. Then get the fuck outside.

Get a job. Volunteer. Have something you need to do after school, several days a week, that forces you to interact with real people... adults, customers, whatever. Right now you have a rich and amazingly unique opportunity to try out anything... volunteer at a pet shelter, or a food bank, or at the local theater... get a part-time job helping out in an office... go work retail in a coffee shop... or find an auto shop that needs someone around to be a gofer.

Do whatever interests you (when I was your age I became a draftsman in a solo architect's office) and gets you out and interacting with the rest of the world.

Because of this: High schoolers are annoying, entitled little shits.

There is nobody more annoying to the rest of the world than a high schooler. So what you need to do is get outside of that microcosm and begin interacting with the real world. Big ears, small mouth. Listen to everyone. Watch how people interact. Learn to respect EVERYONE.

This will put you MILES ahead of your peers when it comes to finding a full-time job. First off, you will have been out there, working, meeting people, impressing some of them with your skills/enthusiasm/learning ability, whatever. So when all your classmates are being entitled little dicks in their interview, and skipping out on their first shift because they are "too good for this job", you will already be ahead of them, with letters of reference from real employed people.

And that means a lot to people like me. Who are going to choose whether or not to interview and/or hire you.

Escape the petri dish. Do your work, and then run off campus to your gig. This will quickly put you several steps ahead of your classmates, when they finally put their heads out of each other's asses and come fumbling out into the harsh light of day...