What Many People Fail to Understand about Educational Acceleration
At the core, it's not really a race against your peers. It's a race against time. Accelerating helps you find your place in the world before time closes in on you and forces you to settle for something else.
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Here’s the thing many people fail to understand about educational acceleration: at the core, it’s not really a race against your peers. It’s a race against time.
When someone gives up on their dream, or gives up on figuring out what that dream is, it’s typically a result of time closing in on them. Pink Floyd put it best:
- "You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run. You missed the starting gun.
And you run, and you run, to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking."
No matter how many times you claim you’ll never settle, it doesn’t keep the sun from setting, it doesn’t prevent the time from passing, it doesn’t prevent you from increasingly desiring things that only a stable life can provide, it doesn’t prevent you from gradually turning the dial from “explore” to “exploit.”
Whether you realize it yet, achieving your dreams is a race against time. The further time gets ahead of you, the more likely you are to settle into a life that is “fine,” or even “good,” but deep down you just can’t shake the feeling that it’s less than something more you could have found if you had more time.
Educational acceleration is about winning that race against time. It’s about opening doors early and running down avenues that you might be interested in exploring, so that
- if you get the feeling the path you're going down has twisted and turned into something that's no longer a great fit for you, you can double back and explore other avenues before doors start locking behind you,
- you can spend time trying to break down a wall instead of running through an existing door if that’s something you want to do, and
- once you find your path into a land that makes you happy, you can maximize your time in that land.
That’s why learning advanced math ahead of time is the greatest educational life hack for any student interested in a science / tech / engineering career. Accelerating helps you find your place in the world before time closes in on you and forces you to settle for something else.
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