Accelerating Your Learning in High School with Max Marchione

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Yurui’s Summary

• You need to have some sort of precedent or some desire to improve yourself to learn more.

• We get dopamine boosts from improving ourselves and taking ownership of what we do, thinking about what we’ve learnt through the day.

• Reject cheap dopamine, and know that how you spend your time matters; instant gratification is so accessible today.

• Life is short. I want to make the most of my time while I’m still alive, do the things that I want to do, and experience as much as possible before I leave this Earth.

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Max Marchione is one of the most incredible people I’ve met - he’s done some pretty insane stuff, such as working at Goldman Sachs, founding an angel investing syndicate, founding Next Chapter (where I’m interning at, a social club for founders, investors and changemakers to connect) and working on building another startup now.

What’s awesome about interning at Next Chapter is its flat structure and ownership that everyone takes with projects. I regularly jump on one-on-one calls with Max and today, we chat about my blog, getting into a pretty insightful conversation about learning as a young person. I journal my insights and takeaways after every call I have, and today, even though it was just a 30 minute conversation, I wrote a couple of thousands of words in takeaways. I’ll share some with you today about how to accelerate your learning while in high school.

‘Do you think you’ve learnt so much as a high schooler because of a tactical, systemic change? Or was it more of a buildup and culmination of many experiences?’

After Max asked me this question, I paused for a time which seemed like an eternity, as I tried to reflect on the past few years of learnings. I thought pretty long and hard about it, but words couldn’t really come to my mouth - so I asked the question back at Max.

His response was that for him, it was a culmination of experiences and projects that he worked on which were the most important. The skills he learnt from working at places like Goldman, doing VC internships, founding his own companies all created who he is today.

And then I looked back, and realised that my own learning was because of my experiences in the past few months working on personal projects, virtual coffee conversations, leadership positions at school, and time spent alone, reading and studying outside of school. It all added up and culminated in a journey of improvement and learning.

However, he mentioned that in order to improve, you need to have some sort of precedent. You need an overarching desire to improve yourself before you can embark on this journey, or otherwise, it’s hard to find motivation. Even if you do have the drive to learn, I might also stress that you need to find out what works best for you when it comes to managing your time.

We came to the conclusion that we both got dopamine boosts from improving ourselves and taking ownership of what we do, through a variety of projects and thinking about what we’ve learnt. In the world that we live in today, instant dopamine is readily available through social media, fast food, playing the wrong sorts of games and indulging in porn. See my thoughts on finding comfort within discomfort here.

Being in his early-mid 20s, Max mentioned how much I’ve learnt over the past 6 months, and he said that he would have loved to have been in the same position as me when he was in high school. I think that it’s absolutely crazy how much your environment and community matters when it comes to learning. Especially in the community of Next Chapter, I have the ability to shoot a message to anyone over Slack or LinkedIn and have some of the most insightful and meaningful conversations about life philosophy, career paths, the world of innovation/startups, and having ownership over what you do. These sorts of conversations, along with reading books, listening to podcasts, and your personal experiences creating stuff really teaches you a ton more than what you learn at school, with respect to how applicable the content is to the real world. That doesn’t mean you should drop out of school though, and I’m still enormously grateful for the opportunities I get every day at school.

Know that how you spend your time matters. Life is short. I want to make the most of my time while I’m still alive, do the things that I want to do, and experience as much as possible before I leave this Earth.

Read more about learning and time management here, or click the title on the bottom right of your screen (they’re the same link).

Yurui