Don’t be too hung up on high school.<p>Ideally, you should have good friends that you stay in touch with after you graduate. But don’t beat yourself up if you don’t.<p>Ideally, you would take extra classes in the area(s) that interest you, and would hopefully help prepare you for college, or whatever you want to be your next step in life. But don’t beat yourself up if you haven’t.<p>Lots of people have done not much in high school, and yet gone on to be wonderful contributing members of society.<p>And lots of people who have “done all the right things” haven’t amounted to much after they left.<p>In my case, since eighth grade (1980), I knew I wanted to “play with computers”, which turned into programming computers, which lead me to take programming classes and extra math classes in high school (graduated in 1984), which turned into getting a degree in computer science (1989), which turned into a career of being a professional System Adminstrator and later a DevOps guy.<p>These days, I think kids get started with computers at a much younger age, and some of them are actually programming computers before they get to 10.<p>If you already know what you want to do with the rest of your life, that’s great! You should follow that at your earliest opportunity.<p>But if not, don’t stress out about it — high school and college are the times in many people’s lives when they start figuring out what they want to do. Some people take a decade or more to get all the way through getting a college degree, because they haven’t figured out yet what they want to do.<p>Most of my cousins do not have college degrees.<p>But one was a top mechanic for Otis elevators, and taught elevator maintenance to hundreds and maybe even thousands of other Otis personnel, in addition to being flown around the world to help them solve some of their stickiest problems. He may not have a degree, but he’s still a really smart guy.<p>Another was a race car driver in his own right in the World of Outlaw sprint car series, as well as being chief mechanic for Sammy Swindell, including the brief time that Sammy was trying to break into NASCAR. He may not have a degree, but I still think he’s the smartest guy I’ve ever known.<p>You don’t have to have a college degree to be a really smart person, or to have a really wonderful and fulfilling life.<p>Although I do think it might help. ;)