Make your schooling experience work for you
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Ask the average manager what they are looking for in a dream hire and the answer will likely involve traits such as resilience, flexibility, creativity, independence, the ability to collaborate - the list goes on. They want players on their teams who think for themselves, identify and tackle challenges without having to have every step of the process spelled out for them, think strategically about the organization’s needs as well as their own - people who can reflect on their own strengths and weaknesses, set goals for themselves and their work and drive relentlessly toward them.
In short, the best employees are not merely those who have a defined skill set or knowledge base, but those with the vision and motivation to actually do something with them. If you run a team, you understand quite well what it is like to have two direct reports of relatively equal ability but completely different efficacy. You know how valuable it is to have partners in the work versus people you have to manage every step of the way. You know the relief when you can hand off a task and not worry whether it will be completed or accomplished at the level it would be if you did it yourself.
We all know what excellent employees looks like, but we do not concern ourselves all that much about whether or not the training ground for our workforce - our schools - actually cultivates them. We are unperturbed by the fact that the traditional schooling program prioritizes compliance above all else. Often when students probe into the reasoning behind some work product or activity they have been assigned at school, they are given an answer uncannily similar to “theirs not to reason why...”
Questioning one’s course - a skill foundational to learning and success - is discouraged. They march forward exam after exam, class after class, year after year, under the assumption that the certifications they earn along the way will open doors, expand their options, make them better. But what arena are we preparing them for? Very few jobs in the modern workplace come with a formula for success. Infrequently do workers interact with knowledge that has been sectioned off into neat, discrete content areas.
Most work (at least that which is not under immediate threat of automation) takes integrative thinking - it relies on iteration and the ability to make connections, cultivate networks of partners, think ahead. In short, all of the things most primary and secondary curricular programs de-emphasize. Memorize, regurgitate, rinse, repeat. Do not collaborate too much with your peers because at the end of the day the most important thing is that your GPA is higher than theirs. So what if you will forget most of what you learned for that exam five minutes after that exam or if it will give you only marginal gain in a college admissions process? It is what high performers have always done. So do not ask questions! Just do it!