Lessons I Wish I Learnt in Secondary School (Cambridge Student)

hey everyone welcome back to the channel so if you're new here my name is ray and i just started my third year doing physics here at cambridge so in this video i'm going to be talking about some personal mistakes and some academic mistakes and some of the lessons i learned from them there will be timestamps in the description down below so do feel free to skip around so my

first mistake as cringy as it sounds was not realizing sooner that the world is so much wider than it appears to be so i think this is a common trap that many people in secondary school can fall into in thinking that um this year group of two to 300 people that i'm gonna know for the next five years are basically the only set of people i'll ever know in my entire life or something like that and if you don't get along with this set of people then you probably won't get along with anyone else in life and that can be like a dangerous mistake to fall into because it can lead you to become too much of a people pleaser and pleasing too many of the people around you and trying to force yourself to be more like others around you rather than trying to be more yourself and this is something i realized going into sex film uh when there were a whole new set of people and even university when there are literally thousands of new people because if you feel like you don't really vibe or get along with anyone during secondary school or six months which in my case i felt like i didn't really get along with anyone sure there were a bunch of people that i did get along with but there was no one in particular that i really got along with it can be quite easy to think that's always going to be the case and that's just not like going into sex form depending on how big your six home is or university or even workplaces you'll be meeting new people all the time and initially it can be a bit overwhelming because you can almost forget how you used to make friends to begin with or in secondary school you can be you just think these other friends i've always had i can't even remember how these friendships formed so it can be a little overwhelming at first but it can be really nice as well because you find so many more people that you get along with especially like late in life in university or like workplace and stuff so this trap of thinking that the 300 people in my secondary school are basically like the entire world or something uh led me to like become too much of a people pleaser and try to please like those around me and just trying to make myself more like other people around me rather than being more myself which probably came to like interest because i just used to be interested in things because my friends were interested in it rather than me genuinely being interested in it and i felt bad when i shared some of my interests because some of my friends just weren't interested in those things so trying to force yourself to become too much like people around you is just not a good thing and it's important to realize that you're going to meet so many more people in life who are going to be interested in those particular things or people that you'll vibrate

much better so on a similar note i'm not realizing the world is so much wider i wish i had also learned cena that you're really not the best at that particular thing so if you're particularly academic and you do you excel in one particular subject and everyone just associates you with that particular subject like say for example for me it was maps when people used to think like who was the best at mouse in the school they would just like end up pointing at my name and it can be quite easy to just grow complacent and i remember one particular example in year 10 when we set some mock exams a bunch of other schools in the borough also set that mock exam and my maths teacher he went to like a interschool meeting or something and they were comparing results between students across these different schools and he came to me the next math lesson and told me that my results were the best in the entire borough and i remember when he told me i was like particularly chuffed and i just let that get to me and i grew complacent and i didn't really think it was worth pushing my math skills anymore but it took me a few years to meet some people who are so much better than me and i also learned those people who are better than me they continued to push their skills much further so i really wish i hadn't grown complacent in improving my math skills and i wish i had to realize so you know that if you're good at something then you should get trying to get even better at it especially if you enjoy that particular thing because late in life you're going to meet so many more people like who are just so much better than you say max or something and it can be initially difficult when you're meeting these people because you can have your identity wrapped up into being good at this particular subject so being the best but when you accept the fact that you're really not and just because you haven't met these thousands or tens of thousands of people who are better than you and that because you haven't met them it doesn't mean they don't exist when you get over that fact it can be such a like fulfilling feeling or just so much better because then you can focus more on actually enjoying the subject rather than having your whole identity wrapped it up and being good at it so i wish i had learned that sooner and enjoyed maps more and pushed my skills more and then when i had met these people he was so much better than me rather than worrying too much about how much better they are me and how i can probably catch up to them or something i could have enjoyed being their friends more or like just enjoy their company more or like discussing this particular subject which i'm also interested in more so my third

mistake was not continuing to do what was interesting to me at the time and i'm going to touch on upon idea which i'm going to be calling the optimizers fallacy so to explain the fallacy i'm going to say imagine yourself you're driving from one particular location to another point a to point b and you don't have any gps or google maps or anything like that and you want to find the best routes from point a to point b so let's say back in the day you get you got your paper map out and you look at where point a is where point b is and generally have like a general direction of where you need to be going along which motorways and whatnot now you may spend about two to three minutes doing this or even five minutes and let's say you want to particularly optimize or you want to get there in the fastest possible time so you spend like another 20 30 minutes trying to just find the most optimal path and knowing exactly which turn to take and on which road like taking the third turn at the end of this road and then waiting like five more roads and then taking like the left turn or something just so you can like travel the least amounts of distance or get them the fastest time now let's say the day comes around and you actually have to make that journey there are a lot more things that can go wrong because say you end up missing a turn you may spend another five minutes trying to like go back to that turn or readjust your path because you've come up with such a detailed plan that when something goes wrong in the plan then you just end up being confused or feeling like you wasted your time or not and let's say this happens a few more times during the journey or at the end of the journey you come to realize that this commute actually took you 30 minutes longer or it may have only saved you five minutes compared to the 30 extra minutes you spent preparing this commute now in that case you're to feel like you've wasted a bunch of your time and this actually happens on like a more longer time scale when it comes to making plans in your life so in short i would describe the optimizer's fallacy as being when you're optimizing for something way too much then you may end up spending more time overall trying to achieve the same particular thing or you just may end up completely missing what you're optimizing for because there was just something in your plan that you just did not account for or you should just had a more general plan going from point a to point b rather than like trying to plan out every tiny detail along the path so an example where i think this applies is say inter-secondary school that you really want to go to say cambridge oxford so you spend all your time coming up with say a detailed plan of how you're going to get there and like doing a whole bunch of research about everything to do with applying maximizing your chances looking at like previous students taking all their advice on board that at this stage you can say come across one piece of misinformation and then spend many weeks or months just applying or using that one piece of misinformation and then just realizing sooner like a year or two later that this was some misinformation that you had been given by some students who were just posting advice online and you basically end up focusing way too much on the details rather than the bigger picture and then after that realization you may have feel like you wasted a few months or say even a year or so and this is essentially where the optimizer's fallacy has come into play you spent way too long coming up with a detailed plan of how you're going to get into this particular university that you just end up losing the forest for the trees and just end focusing way too much on the details which just leads you to waste your time and it would have been much better if you had focused on like two overarching ideas of you have to be really good at your subject and you have to have an interest in your subject now an example of where i think this came in for me is that i knew i had to be interested in the subjects i was applying for so i kept searching about all the ways that people showed their interest for physics online and just ended up trying to show my interest in a similar way rather than focusing on the way i personally share my interest of physics so i used to think that i had to read a bunch of books and write better my personal statement or something uh when it came to applying to cambridge um and just end up reading all the same books that everyone else was reading but i much rather wanted to write about some lectures i had seen online or some random youtube videos that i thought were particularly interesting or cool and had i just gone for that initially i would have saved myself a bunch of time reading a bunch of books i didn't really need to read and i could have just written about hey like i'm interested in physics because i saw this like crazy cool youtube video online and i tried doing a few experiments myself and that would have just come across so much better and i wouldn't have wasted as much time suffered from the optimizer's value there now this also applies to when it came to improving my problem solving skills for admission tests and interviews so having good problem solving skills is particularly useful but i used to spend way too much time trying to find resources online that i was spending like 50 of my time just finding resources online to improve my skills and trying to come up with like the best set of resources for me to use but i should have been instead spent like five percent of my time actually finding the resources and 95 using them and i would have saved myself a whole bunch of time that way and i would have gotten much better problem solving so let's mean those are like the two main ways optimizing fallacy has come into my academic life but it's also coming into my personal life a few times which i may talk about

later now something else i wish i had to realize sooner is that you have much more control than you think you do and i think a common failing of secondary schools and say schooling in general is that you have this idea of learned helplessness where you're basically on the receiving end of a lot of things just happening to you in life and you always feel like you're not really in control or you're just end of a cog in the machine or you're just part of some system um and like you're just going along some conveyor belt and you can't really decide what happens to you that veritasium has a whole video on learned helpness which i would recommend watching after this one which should be linked down below but ultimately during secondary school and for most like my younger brother and a few other people i certainly can see you just feel helpless for the five years you're there or you just don't feel like you're in control of a lot of things and you feel like you're on the receiving end of a lot of things and i think the feeling of realizing that you have way much more or you have way more control than you think you do and the wall is much wider and you can sort of like nudge and like push it in the way that you want is particularly fulfilling and i came to this realization during university when it just came to like emailing people or called emailing and i remember there were a few cases where i just really wanted to do something and just wanted to make it happen um and then i just had this idea of learned helplessness thinking that hey like i just can't i need to like go through the proper way or go through like the normal system and this happened recently because i wanted to attend a swim program last summer and applications for the program had closed many months before and i felt like i had no chance and that people who went through the proper way were going to be the ones going on it so because i really wanted to go in the program i just ended up called messaging the co-director of the program explaining like i really want to go and go on this program i'm like this is these are the reasons why i'm excited about the program can we like schedule some calls sometime to talk about it and then she ended up saying yes and we had like a two-hour chat and at the end of the chat she was like i'm pretty convinced that you would be a good fit for this program and it was the idea of like just going through the back door or just not going through the normal application process which was just so much better or i just found so much more fulfillment from and this idea of like thinking about the ways you want to shape the world around you and controlling then just making that happen can be a particularly fulfilling feeling so ways in which i think this could have been implied when i was in secondary school is there were many times where there was some particular famous person or some author youtuber a person doing a podcast or anything in between um who i was particularly interested in and i really wanted to speak to them rather than just giving up and thinking damn there's no way i'd be able to speak to this particular person i should have just gone ahead called the email called message of them found them on whatever social network they are on and just send them a message being like hey i really like your stuff like can we just chat like this is these are all the reasons why i like your stuff can we chat about x y and z and then just try and schedule a call with them i think that would be so much more fun and so much more better and it would have like just opened my eyes up to much more opportunities and i

think this is another point i want to mention more of just speaking to people much more and speaking to like people who are older than you much more as well because something i find particularly useful is trying to gather as many data points uh from like i call it gathering data points speaking to as many people about the future and sort of say people who are in existing careers asking them why they're that why they're in that particular career the journey that led up to that point what their plans for the future are and basically trying to understand as many people as possible to some degree because for a lot of these decisions say when it comes to speaking to enough people about the future and their career and what they like about it and don't what not many of these decisions whatever decision you come to you feel much more confident and much more comfortable in knowing that you've spoken to enough people and you've gathered enough data points from these people so i personally found that particularly useful as summon because i tried to speak to as many people as possible about these particular questions and i've got us a whole bunch of responses and ideas which i thought were really cool and in the future i just didn't i just realized it weren't as cool as i thought they were and which was particularly beneficial for me and ideas which i had never really considered i'm now considering much more because i had just spoken to enough people so even when it comes to say secondary school there aren't enough people around you to speak to if you really want to say go into this particular industry where you really want to do this particular degree or really want to work out like some particular company in the future then just making say a linkedin account and finding people who are doing that particular thing by learning to use linkedin well and just like sending them messages on linkedin being like hey i really like the stuff you're doing or i really like this thing you're doing can we just like schedule a zoom call sometime and just talk about it i think that can be particularly useful and during this time you will have a whole bunch of people who will say no or he would straight up ignore you which is completely fine because for many of these cases you literally just need one person to say yes and that one person saying yes could just completely change a game for you so one of the things i find useful is just creating a rejections document so for any like program or thing that i've really tried to work harder and just got rejected by i just put a rejections folder rejections document and then just compiling this list of rejections is like somewhat fulfilling in a way because it shows me like it shows to myself that i have been trying particularly hard and trying to do a whole bunch of really interesting things so yeah basically you have a lot of power to shape the world around you and try and use it and just contact people who you want to speak to and just learn as much as you can from as many people as possible anyways those are the

main lessons i wish i had learned in secondary school but try to take each lesson with a grain of salt and don't apply it like obsessively in your life because that may be detrimental in the long run or you may suffer from the optimizer's policy but that's basically it for the video i guess i'll see you next time bye