Ask HN: Does anyone have some good Career/Life Advice for an 18 year old

You can try your hand at algorithms. You can implement them in a language of your choice, try different methods, try to speed things up etc.

If you are in to math, you can try projecteuler.com, it is a good learning source, provides lots of interesting problems to solve.

You can check code katas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kata_(programming)

The idea is not that important at first. By doing even simpliest things, you will expand your knowledge on programming, which in turn will guide you about what you can do with it.

One of the best things you can do for yourself, at this juncture, is to just ignore what everyone says about your "potential" based on your grades, test scores, the schools you went to (or the schools that rejected you), your work history etc up until this point.

You have, at this stage in the game, so much plasticity available to you, and (despite all those shitty part time jobs, etc) so much time. Moreover: what people tend to forget about talent and how it really develops is that not only does it faithfully reward hard work (and focus), but it rewards it exponentially.

So anything you invest your time into now... be it advanced math classes, that hairy functional programming book that might seem hopelessly daunting and abstruse to you now... as well as non-technical endeavors like learning about how music is made, or about foreign languages, literature, psychoanalysis, etc -- might not seem to pan out, in terms of tangible benefits, for another 5-10 years. But taken together, these investments will find a way of leveraging each other synergistically, enhancing not only your potential to get a better job, but more fundamentally, your ability to improve yourself -- and over time, quite dramatically.

That, and: "it's better to regret something you have done, than to regret something you haven't done."

Specifically: the next time a fork in the road comes along, requiring you to make a decision about some major commitment of time and/or focus -- be it grad school, or a close relationship say -- and you're feeling pulled both ways about it: try defaulting to the "heavier" option (requiring greater time/energy investment) than the "lighter" one.

Point being, of course you can fail, and see energies misdirected, no matter what you do. But generally speaking you'll tend to at least learn more, and grow more, the more you are willing to make heavier, riskier investments of your resources. And you'll find yourself feeling far less ennui and regret when you think back about how things crashed and burned despite everything you tried and did... than in moments when you opted to simply duck for cover, and let the moment pass.