If you think something is important but people older than you don't hold it in high regard, there's a reasonable chance that you're right and they're wrong. Status lags by a generation or more.

Try to go deep on multiple things. One of the main things you should try to achieve by age 20 is some sense for which kinds of things you enjoy doing. This probably won't change a lot throughout your life and so you should try to discover the shape of that space as quickly as you can.

Nobody is going to teach you to think for yourself. A large fraction of what people around you believe is mistaken. The correlation between your worldview and those around you shouldn't be too strong unless you think you were especially lucky in your initial conditions.

Heuristic for whether you're on a sufficiently weird path: do your friends at school think your path is a bit strange? If not, maybe it's too normal. Good schools push you toward train tracks laid by others rather than charting your own course.

San Francisco is the Schelling point for high-openness, smart, energetic, optimistic people. Global Weird HQ. Figure out a way to get there and meet others who've moved to pursue their dreams.

Make friends over the internet with people who are great at things you're interested in. The internet is one of the biggest advantages you have over prior generations — leverage it.

People who did great things often did so at very surprisingly young ages. They were grayhaired when they became famous, not when they did the work. So, hurry up.

Making things — operating in a space with a lot of uncertainty — is a very different experience from learning something. Don't confuse the two.