I’ve never been to any school. Not elementary school, not middle school, not high school. My parents practiced unschooling — they let me do whatever I wanted with all my time.
As one might expect, I spent a lot of time gaming.
What this actually looked like
From ages 0 to 7, I played around as a kid outside. Not much of note that I remember :-)
From 7 to 12, I played a lot of tennis. At the peak, I played 5hrs/day at academies my family could barely afford even after the scholarships we got. I eventually burned out from the pressure and a toxic coach. Thank God I did, because I was getting interested in computers at that time.
From 12 to 15, I was fascinated by computers and everything I could do with them. I loved automation and hacking. And video games of course. I wasted thousands of hours getting top 100 in an obscure hero shooter and playing Minecraft.
At 15, I became convinced that how AI goes would dictate the future of the world universe. Wanting to save the universe help the future be good, I decided I needed to get good at math. At this point I was at maybe a 5th-grade level in math, at 15! Not because I was bad at it, but because I never spent any time on it. (Crazy how that works!)
Having heard the phrase “Learning how to learn” before, I went off and researched the best learning methods available. Sal Khan’s talk on mastery learning convinced me to start at something like 4th grade on Khan Academy, to make sure I was not missing any prerequisites. I also remember this paper convinced me to focus on active testing and spaced repetition.
I spent 4hrs/day doing math. I know the number because I was religiously tracking my time on toggl. I ended up finishing high school + calculus BC on Khan Academy over the next 6 months. Then linear algebra, real analysis, probability theory, abstract linear algebra, etc. over the next year. I started loving math.
After “getting serious” with respect to my time management and goals from 15–17, I applied to Atlas and got in. This brought me to the Bay Area and led to me meeting most of the wonderful friends I have now.
After that, I spent ~6 months in the Bay doing research and eventually moved over permanently around 19. I’m 21 now, and there’s a lot more to the story that I might write about later. Briefly, the arc was: (1) Throw myself entirely into working on saving the world, regardless of feelings. (2) Burn out, get incredibly depressed while in a toxic relationship (3) Break up; get incredibly heartbroken about how I hurt the person I loved the most in the world & repeated my parents toxic patterns (4) Become obsessed with inner work, emotions, understanding myself and relationships (5) Said obsession continues to today. Understanding myself and growing seems to be at the root of what I care about, and what results in my dreams being fulfilled (or not). So I care about it a great deal.
What I learned from my weird upbringing
I don’t have a normal upbringing to compare to, but a few guesses (?):
- I don’t have the standard concepts for what institutions like school “should be like”. This is good, I think, given how horrifyingly bad our institutions are in general.
- That my life and education were my own responsibility. Had to manage myself.
- That under the right conditions I could manage my time and have self-discipline reasonably without having external structure.
Personally, I would do a weaker form of all this with my own kids. The Polgár sisters are an excellent example. I’ve heard from a friend that the book “Nevelj zsenit!” (Raise a Genius!) from László Polgár is good. Raising genius children that are happy and well-adjusted seems to be a skill issue (like most things).