11. The popular group in high school aren't necessarily popular outside of that closed ecosystem (yeah, so I wasn't one of the popular ones in high school…but somehow got the tag of being a “cool nerd”)

12. The people that you surround yourself with can rub off on you (refers to #10)

13. There are certain times where you need to swallow it up and follow the “system” (I skipped school a day a week by year 12..although this is a rant in itself – ie how high school/uni can encourage engagement from types like me)

14. I should have encouraged my team to take up debating in senior high school – that was really fun

15. Senior high school made me really anxious (like a lot of other teens), so should have spoken out about that + chillaxed more

I’ll start by saying I really love reading your blog and am a big fan.

Enjoyed this post but felt it is very skewed to a Western perspective and missed that vital thing I call “The Migrant Work Ethic.” My parents came out here when I was 9 years old. Mabo had just won land rights for Aboriginals, recession had hit hard, multiculturalism didn’t exist and migrant was a dirty word. In order to send their kids to good schools, they worked like maniacs in menial jobs, and taught us to do the same. A decade later, after fitting in, conforming, doing the right thing, not getting in trouble and studying like crazy, my migrant work ethic got me into Harvard. My parents re-mortgaged their house and took on second jobs to pay the fees, while I worked 18 hour days to fill the financial gap.

There is a real sense of entitlement here in Australia, and in Western culture in general, that is both good and bad. What annoys me is this idea that hard work is something shameful, that being a big thinker excludes you from working hard or putting in the grunt work. Big ideas require commitment and discipline to be executed. Just ask your account managers or your junior planner. You suggest that capitalism requires big thinkers, but the reality is that China’s economic growth is not fuelled by big thinkers but by a work ethic that doesn’t exist in the West, and factories full of workers willing to stand and do the jobs that the West considers below them.

Rote learning, uniforms, deadlines—these things teach discipline, respect for authority and a sense of duty that create socially responsible human beings. One can be just as creative in a uniform. And children need the guidance. What they do after this is up to them, but as parents and as a society, we have an obligation to teach them the basics.

As for my parents, they were the menial labour you shipped your ideas out to. My father, who grew up in the slums of Delhi, considers his daughter his greatest achievement. What he doesn’t know is that she considers her father her greatest hero because he was courageous enough to give up his dreams to allow his children to have the privilege of chasing their own.

From then on I was a little more careful, but I believe we’ve gradually lost something with the rise in safety anxiety, particularly regarding our children. I learned so much in that mistake; what it might be like to be deaf, not to mention a first hand experience with a massive exothermic reaction. But we (people, government, the media, etc) are so nervy about anything potentially dangerous that to merely mention the key oxidizing components of said reaction would get your blog flagged by every Western intelligence agency!