My granddad and dad were both A students of a sort ... so I didn't have much choice of focus up to the age of 17. I had already deprioritised formal education by that point, but I had been prepping for college scholarship from the age of 9.
So, I finished the process, lucked out, and got into my uncle's alma mater, presumably as a sort of legacy hire. You hope the world out there is nicer than the one you grew up in. It was something like a MYR 500k scholarship, so it was fun, a good standard of living.
But at that age of 18 I decided to be a B+ student, because I wasn't impressed by the A students or the people who were teaching people them that way. This changed my life path significantly, making me what I am today.
At the time, I figured it would still be possible to maximise learning by focusing on the less-graded aspects of academic life, which would not have been possible if I focused on As (I don't consider myself super smart, and there is always only so much time for things).
But then I took interest in the fact, that the entire billion MYR school around me, wasn't actually focused on learning as a matter of organising the history of all knowledge, but rather on producing marketable class stratification to satisfy the "notion of education" held in esteem by industry.
I studied this keenly in my second year at college, then decided to drop out and save the college the second half of my scholarship. A dean told me that the institution preferred we finish, so I figured I'd just sit the "job" out, till the end. One of the more interesting things I got to do, was represent the student government on a faculty committee, which redesigned the general education requirements.
Along the way, I somehow found time to luck out into another development : I had been trying for a few years, to see if I could map all of my conscious experiences to quantifiable data structures ... and somehow I managed to figure it out. It was a paradigm shift, which made me think I should just dwell on it for twenty years, as a matter of testing.
At 22, I finally got my degree, avoided setting it on fire on stage ( my mom had said she would kill herself ), and returned home to Malaysia where I began the next leg of my study plan : commerce, technology, politics, and trying to understand how Malaysia works.
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Postscript : Two people asked if there is a part 2. I have recorded most of my journals online for two decades. But summary stories typically read better when there is a lens with humanistic appeal. Currently I don't believe I have one. If I were to retell stories for the sake of telling them, the last two decades would mainly be a story of things a bored kid did in Malaysia which confirmed that mostly, life is boring.
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