you want to hear something crazy? The good old days are a lie. You don't need to feel pressure to make your teenage years the most fun, best years of your life because they won't be.

And guess what? You also don't need to stress about being super productive to set your future self up for success. If you're between the ages of 13 through 18 and you play your cards right, you will be living your best life for decades and still get to enjoy being a teenager.

Now you know how I know? Because that's exactly my experience and those of my friends who are killing it at life. I spent months creating this video because it's one of the most important ones I've ever made, and every teenager should listen to these messages, so buckle up.

Buckle up. Imagine your life as playing a game of golf. You have your golf ball in front of you and you have a club to hit it with.

So with each hit, your goal is to get the golf ball as close to your destination as possible. Imagine you hit it in one direction, angle A. Now what if you change your angle just 2°?

So now you hit the ball at angle B. Well, it seems like those 2° is so minimal, right? Maybe you can't even see the difference, but the farther the ball gets hit, you will see that those two degrees made a larger and larger difference.

That represents each of the decisions you make in your life. They may seem like small decisions now, but the earlier you make them, like in your teenage years, the greater impact will materialize farther and farther down the line.

Eventually, when golf ball A and golf ball B land, you wouldn't even know that they came from the same spot.

That's the power in your decisions now, as early as possible. When you're older and you're in your 20s, only then trying to make good decisions that will make far less impact than if you had started earlier, so that's why it's so incredibly critical to take care of your teenage years.

I'm sharing with you today how to hit that golf ball right, so you're on the winning trajectory.

But you might be wondering, who the heck am I to tell you how to spend your precious teenage years? Well, I'm Amy. I got into a top 10 University while sleeping an average of 8 hours a night and having a social life.

Now I'm currently living my best life in the playground of New York City.

Yeah, in New York, my work barely feels like work, and I get to share amazing experiences with the best people.

But how did I get here, and how can you get to your best life as well? Just like I explained in my golf ball analogy, what I did in the past significantly paid off later to get me to my dream life today.

As a teenager, I didn't know it at the time, but it wasn't good grades and awards that got me to where I am, but it was these four keys that you will learn today.

Remember, the first way to get your golf ball on the winning trajectory is to set this video on full screen and lock in, so you're already above average.

Let's go. How much do you care about fitting in? When I was in middle school, I was super insecure and felt like the least cool person, especially because I was on the basketball and volleyball teams, and the other girls made me feel way less than them.

I felt so much pressure to follow what other people were doing.

I had this friend who had very strong opinions, and she was considered cool. For example, at dinner she would say, ew, this dish is so gross, and even though I really liked it, I would follow and be like, yeah, ew, that's so gross.

Even going into high school, I didn't know how to do makeup like the other girls.

I was never invited to parties, and I was always the one who never got asked out to a single school dance.

I struggled with this desire of fitting in with a cool crowd, but I also knew my values. I valued to do what was good for me and for my future.

That includes studying, doing math competitions, but that also conflicted with what people thought was cool.

Therefore, to stick with my values and to cope, I reframed what I was doing as cooler than what other people were doing.

This habit of thinking also makes you more confident in your choices and opinions. Now, instead of just agreeing with my friend that something is gross, I can happily say, hey, I'm not going to go to that football game today because I need to study for my math test.

That was the best way to happily and sustainably develop my best self.

I stopped wanting to fit in. I heard inspirational stories of people who stood out instead of fitting in and thought, I want to be like them.

I'm meant for more and I'm special. I don't want to be like the other kids at my school.

Thinking this way and then acting in accordance with this mindset paid off. In AP Environmental Science class, I was the only one who was in the back of the classroom studying on the black lab tables while my classmates were fooling around and chatting, but guess what?

I was also the only one who got a five on that AP test, and I was the only one there who got a five on the AP Physics test.

achieving things like that through my hard work and resilience made me proud to be the only one, even better, I was actually happier than many of my peers who also wanted straight A's because they saw studying as uncool and as a burden, but with my reframing, I saw studying as being cool because I'm using my privilege and this opportunity.

If I tried hard, I don't know what I will get exactly, but I know it will pay off and I will be cooler than all of these peers in the future.

After volleyball practice, when the girls are grouped together gossiping, obviously leaving me out because they can't relate to me doing math competitions or me studying so much, I thought, hey, that's okay, you do you, I'm going to do me, and I know this will pay off because I'm okay with being the only one.

I feel like some people might take this the wrong way and think it's vengeful, but I'm just trying to say that you want to take everything to your advantage.

If you're left out, think, huh, maybe I'm being left out as a good thing.

If 99% of people are going to that party, hey, I'm the 1%, and maybe me being that 1% that stays back to study will actually make me the top 1% in the future.

I got to excel in school while being more content, while building my human capital. These skills ended up being invaluable to me by the time I went to apply for college, make new friends, and search for my first job.

When you choose to stand out and work on yourself, you give yourself options because now I have the option of working anywhere I want in the world, but I could not have this flexibility right now if I didn't build my human capital to do so.

The people who limit themselves by fitting into boxes now will be limiting themselves far more in the future now.

This doesn't mean you write off all your friends and outwardly become this strange Lone Wolf. I still had friends, this just means that you have to be super strong about your own beliefs on the inside.

I know it can be really hard with peer pressure, and if you don't have anyone to do this with you, so you can strengthen your mindset with my podcast, Your A+ Life.

Just like on this channel, I hope that by sharing my experiences excelling in school sustainably and building my dream life can help you do the same.

For example, in this episode, I talked about how I made myself lucky even though I was technically unlucky by having a disability of migraines.

Don't forget that you can't be number one one without being odd.

I discovered this really helpful piece of advice that I haven't seen anyone else talk about in my interactions with others, whether it was in high school, college, and Caltech, or work.

There are some people who tend to be more efficient, diligent, proactive, resilient. These are the people who are disciplined enough to pull themselves away from a conversation late at night and say they have to go to sleep.

These are also the people who I found are much more passionate about living a fun and exciting life instead of being on their phones all the time.

I realized that there was something in common with most of these people.

Can you guess what it is before I share? Playing sports. I talked about this with my sister and she agreed and said she realized the exact same thing.

Playing organized sports where you might have to wake up at 4:00 a.m., you have to practice for 3 hours a day, no matter what, you have to show up to practice 15 minutes early and stretch and run laps, and then you have to play games where you're under tons of pressure, you have to be on a team and cheer each other on, you have to pick yourself up even when you feel down for the well-being of the whole group.

These experiences give you years upon years of maturity, you accelerate your life skills, you get so much discipline because you have to push yourself even when you feel like you can't go any longer.

When I was at Caltech and on the basketball team, teams, I felt like I was going to collapse half the time, but I had to still run sprints and make my free throws.

When you have commitments and practices that you can't just shrug off, you have to learn how to be efficient and manage almost like a part-time job of playing sports in addition to school and homework and other activities.

For this tip, I was contemplating saying, oh, you can just do some activity that has competitions, but no, sports just hits different, okay?

To say the least, if you can't do sports, then at least be on some organized team like robotics that requires commitment, cooperation, and growth.

In fact, you could suck at that activity, you could suck at that sport, but it doesn't matter, your experience will set you eons ahead of other people who don't have exposure to that kind of environment and commitment.

I had no natural talent at basketball and volleyball, and I was a benchwarmer at Caltech, but did I still gain a ton from them?

Yes, and so will you. And the cool thing is that because everything is holistic, these skills will carry into other areas of your life such that you will become a better student, friend, and everything else you want to be more easily.

What do you think is more important, hard skills or soft skills? Hard skills are technical abilities like being able to code, do math, chemistry, while soft skills are ability to present something, to speak with others, to empathize and to write.

Ding, ding, ding, it is the soft skills part.

And this is very interesting because I really, really worked on my hard skills, hence being able to get into Caltech, which is one of the hardest STEM universities in the world.

But when it came to career opportunities, fun events with friends, and just making life better overall, it was my soft skills that I realized paid off so much.

But how did I get those soft skills if I was doing a lot of math and technical work?

Well, that came from having jobs that help people. Ever since high school, I've been privately tutoring students. It's been amazing for me to adapt to different students' learning styles, their backgrounds, and experiences.

I have a more open mind and can empathize with people who think differently from me, and I learned how to work with people who are different from me and how to be persuasive and get the result I want even when someone is difficult.

This isn't a job where I earn money per se, but I also volunteered at the hospital.

I worked at the front desk, so often patients and really stressed moms about to give birth would come up and ask me for help and I had to be able to calm them down and handle people relationships under pressure.

Working a job in services is highly underrated. Every single person should have the experience of serving other people like being a waitress at a restaurant.

That experience just makes you a better person, honestly, because then you also know to respect other service workers.

and you will become a superstar at dealing with different kinds of people, no matter if they are grumpy or they're stressed about a certain situation. You will be able to handle it all, and you will be so surprised at how much that helps you in the future.

Even if you are bad at the technical skills.

As a bonus, if this experience helps you earn money, you will start to learn the value of money and how hard it is to actually get it, so you won't just want to buy whatever you want now with your parents' money, and you will work harder for your future.

Finally, if you're watching this, this might be controversial, but you'll see what I mean.

If you're watching this, you probably care about self-improvement, and you've been watching videos to work on your self-improvement.

However, when I was a teenager, did I care about doing extra self-improvement outside of school?

Heck, I could barely get my homework done and do sports and extracurriculars and just live a happy teenage life, so I didn't have time to search the latest self-improvement books or to decide, hey, I'm going to do five push-ups a day to get better and be more disciplined.

And if I do say so myself, I think I turned out pretty well. Actually, I have the resilience, the efficiency, the discipline, and all those other skills those self-improvement gurus talk about, but I didn't purposefully search them out as a teenager.

See, the thing is, as a teenager, please don't care too much about doing extra self-improvement.

You are already doing so much, and these are the years where you're developing your character, your skills, your awareness, your relationships, so much that you are automatically self-improving.

You just need to try your best in the things you have to do in your life and then reflect on how you can do them better.

Like, I didn't read a single self-development book before college, but what's crazy is that when I read my first self-development book, I discovered that the tips in there were things that I've already developed myself.

Like, I knew a lot of the advice by simply trying my best and reflecting in the things that I was already busy with as a teenager. Tips and videos are great and super helpful, but you should adapt them to things you're already doing, and you, you don't need to go out of your way and be like, hey, I need to learn discipline, so I'm going to add climbing a mountain to my list.

No, you can learn discipline by doing better in your math class or working harder in tennis and staying off your phone.

If you have five things you're working on in your life already, then get those all to 100% before you try and add on self-improvement.

Extra self-improvement by doing these four things as a teenager, I accidentally set myself up to have the dream life I have now.

Just because you're younger doesn't mean it's going to be the good old days because right now I honestly wouldn't choose to go back in time and live as a teenager again because I just love the kind of life that I've built for myself.

I have the freedom, I have the flexibility, I have the most amazing people around me because I found myself and my values, putting myself in a place where I'm always growing, like I am always leveling up the past, and when I'm young is not where I peaked.

I'm always growing. Even if you are 18 or 19 or any age outside of this age range that I said, remember, I'm trying not to be exclusive, it's just a good—it's just a good title.

You've been seeing how those videos are blowing up.

Okay, I got to do what I got to do. Anyway, even if you're outside of this age range, it's never too late start doing these.

Now, even if you weren't on the best trajectory, you have time to shift over to the winning path and you're doing great because here in this YouTube community, we are the A-team, the best team where our amazing members are acing school and beyond by having the right mindset and working on holistic habits.

Join by hitting that subscribe button and giving this a like so we can make our 18 even bigger and help more people, and remember to check out my podcast, Your A+ Life, where you can rewire your mindset and make getting on the right golf trajectory easier than ever, because just like I always say, mindset is something really undervalued nowadays.

Like, all the advice is about what actions to take, but you cannot do those helpful actions without the right mindset.

Great job and I'll see you next time. Reaching out and having coffee chats with people who are more experienced and more knowledgeable is so so helpful.

In my latest coffee chat, the guy told me that people will try to conform their profile and their essays into something they think the admissions officers will like, but what that ends up doing, as he predicts, is make everyone look more similar.

His recommendation is at the end of the day, just be super authentic, share your true story as long as it makes sense with a program and have fun with it.

And knowing that bottom line just took a lot of pressure off of me because I think a lot of the stress was what do they want to see?

How do I make myself look more like that?

but I remember that I actually am, I think, exactly the kind of person this program wants, so I just have to present that, I just have to let that shine through the words on the page.

If you’re 13-18 years old, please watch this video…

If you’re 13-18 years old, please watch this video…

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