37 · A Mile Wide, an Inch Deep

We can do the A-levels, but it's going to be hard in one specific way: you need to resist your urge to dive deep and analyse everything — temporarily. It's about building a fast trigger library from marking schemes and past papers, occasionally visiting the textbook. If you think the main source of material is the textbook, you'll fumble everything. A-level rewards breadth and fluency, not depth. It's a mile wide and an inch deep. Your instinct is to go deep. That instinct is correct for a research scientist, a mathematician, a physicist — and it's a liability for this specific task. So suck it up, get it over with, and train yourself to do it. Putnam, IMC, the physics competitions — they'll need your research mind. For the A-levels, do the bare minimum. Even in creative work and startups there is administrative work that can't be outsourced; get used to doing tedious things and knowing when to shift gears.

So what tools should I focus on? Building fast trigger libraries, memorising without diving into the why — for now — and training the reactions to automaticity. Completely opposite skillsets: no studying definitions deeply, no analysing, no asking why, no intellectual connections, no first principles. It's administrative training. Boring, unstimulating, tedious — and what's worse is being undervalued for not even doing that.

There are two types of studies: converging studies and diverging studies. The latter is scientific exploration; the former is purely for deriving maximum marks with minimum effort. You need both, and you need to know when to switch gears. This is true for life too — you have to know how to break into the system. You might be entirely wrong in the intuition that you need to read unfathomable amounts and know everything. That's the whole point: it's not doing everything blindly and hoping. You do only what is needed.

Yes, the system is rigged; yes, it's stupid; yes, high marks on A-levels and real mathematical creativity are independent skillsets. But focus on writing the right sequence, the right answer, now. Learning to use calculators. This too is a skill: to dumb yourself down and temporarily play by the rules. Focus meticulously on that, and you'll outperform those focused on the wrong thing — which, here, is getting better at maths. The aim is to write out the mathematical expressions and the verbal sequences that the marking schemes incentivise. Ironically this is also true of university admissions, corporate culture, and most of business: pure skill and competence is only one variable of the game, and for some games — like the A-levels — it's weakly correlated with winning.

For the A-levels I have a strong bias toward holding curiosity back, temporarily. Focus on the memorisation of formulae, the practice of them, the repping through. It's not that much — we can do this. This peace from Christ is not something to take for granted, considering I have fifteen exams and ten competitions going on.

A-levels are, brutally honestly, so easy for me that it's an insult. I'm frustrated I didn't get A*A*A* the first time, not to mention full marks. Come back stronger — this is way too easy. And the worst advice I ever absorbed: "if you want something as badly as you want to breathe, you will get it." Absolute nonsense. That level of desperation drops you into a victim mindset and you lose your rationale. The best example is sales — begging on your knees is not the blueprint for closing deals. You have to be bold enough to walk away from a closed deal.