Ask HN: What would you tell your 16-year-old self?

Have fun building interesting, useful and problem solving things. Do not have an ego of any problem being too small to solve, you'll have lots of friends in your 20's one day who talk a lot and don't do much.

Ignore everyone, their standards, and set/pursue your own standards and curiosities.

You will meet many people older than you that are full of their own doubts, and think they can't beat their own doubts so they might get you doubting yourself. Run like hell whenever someone shows this.

Read PG's essay geared to students, it sums up a lot of the great mentoring advice I got when I was 16 and doing things I had no business doing at that age:

http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

Ps., the above essay isn't just for any startup ideas, but anything you tinker around with and pursue.

Learn about health and cooking, be skeptical of any products sold as 'healthy'. There's a lot of good and bad information out there. Learn as you go and make slow progress.

Eat real food and learn to cook from raw ingredients. It's the only way to eat healthy and cheap. Produce is much cheaper if you follow seasonal cycles. Comparison shop everything, explore your city. Think ramen is cheap? Find your local asian import store and buy those noodles in bulk; that's cheap.

Don't go on drastic diets or cleanses, you'll just stress your body out. Eating has a big effect on mood and energy level, pay attention to these things.

I'd tell my 16y old self to immediately change to a different school with elite courses and less fascism and mobbing. To inform myself more about Electrical Engineering and how it's not IT (a job agency I went to inform myself convinced me that it's including IT, but it didn't). Then either decide to start and finish it, or to do Computer Science from the beginning. I would also tell myself to not cheat doing the homework using UML reverse-engineering, but do the Java homework myself. The last thing is that I would tell myself is to not build the Chess MMOG my former Boss asked me to do, but convince him to build that Social Network I planned to do in 2004.

@ejsaz is there something you really like doing, or have already a talent for? It doesn't need to be related to programming, but if you do what you like and you're doing it with your heart, then you have much better chances to turn that into a successfull startup than with other ideas. Don't tell yourself that you'll do it tomorrow, always think about this habit as a sickness. Do things you want to do when earlier than you think it needs to be done and don't do a lot of stuff in parallel. Try reducing or stopping to watch TV and all the Media and focus on your own ideas and feelings.

That's very true, you're well prepared. Much better than most teenagers I know.