Ever since 8th grade, I've obsessed over why it is that some people seem to perform at a level superior to everyone else, and all the while making it seem easy.

I've wondered how Kobe Bryant, my idol, finds motivation to sleep at midnight and wake up to go to the gym at 4 AM each morning. I've wondered how Michael Jordan went to became the best of all time after being cut from his high school team.

I've wondered how Evan Chen is able to fly back and forth from Taiwan to the US in his senior year for TSTs, 41 the USAMO from 12: 30 to 5 AM each day, publish research papers in which I get lost after the first paragraph, attend the RSI, write a monstrosity of a geometry textbook as well as the Napkin, take multiple college level math classes, and be an extremely prolific AoPS user and contestant, all as a high school student.

Just recently, after having talked to the school's principal personally, I've gotten inspiration from him - whose brain functions almost triple the speed of an average person. He makes hundreds of conversations a day - from counselors to teachers to parents to secretaries to administration, etc. (I went to his office about 10 times before finally catching him vacant), and yet he finds the energy to maintain a fiercely positive attitude towards his job. In fact, when I talked to him, it was past 5 PM on a school day, and he was packing up to leave as I had my conversation with him. Yet, even after rehearsing my lines over 20 times, I was only barely able to get my point across and catch up with his pace of speaking.

The question is, what is it that separates these people from the rest?

My answer to this question is simple. I believe in order to achieve a high level of success in anything, there're two parts - initial appeal and the feedback loop.

Appeal is essentially the instant satisfaction one gets from performing an activity, for example swishing a basketball shot (which even a novice will eventually achieve after a few clanks). This is why sports hold a much higher appeal than math - certainly, the image of an explosive dunk with fans, cheerleaders, and cameramen in the background is more appealing than yelling "EUREKA" in the loneliness of your room after proving a hard mathematical theorem.

The next stage is feedback - think of this as the treat a dog gets after he successfully imitates a trick. For sports, this is often in the form of approval from your peers, as well as an enhancement of physicality and increase of confidence. For mathematics, due to the low sense of appeal, developing a strong feedback system is the only path to enhance students' mathematical abilities overall. Top-performing schools succeed in math competitions because of the culture of problem-solving, the merit system in which achievement is rewarded that instills the positive feedback loop into students: work hard => good results => acknowledgement => work even harder. The social factor of math competitions is a double-edged sword - it leads to more participation and hard work, but at the same time is an evil that feeds off of the low-moral desire of kids to look good in front of others.

This feedback loop was nowhere to be found at my school when I entered as a freshman.

Environment is why Exeter and TJ consistently produces such high-achieving students every year. It's not because my school is necessarily less talented in math than these top-performing schools. In fact, I can name off the top of my head a list of students who probably have higher IQs than myself but never found the opportunity and encouragement to pursue math. Heck, if I had never discovered the AoPS community, I would still be that above-average student in math class who scores well on tests but whose potential doesn't seem to go any further than that. What haunts me is that there're definitely many other Michaels younger than me who holds at least as much talent as I did when I started competition math, but whose talents are being squandered because the system prioritizes grades and standardized tests over the pursuing of passion. Even now that I hold a certain level of fame and acknowledgement in school, occasionally (esp. since the assembly) people have come up and asked me what's the point of doing math competition problems when the chemistry test is tomorrow.

My awareness of the above last year put me into depression.

I would often rationalize for my sources of depression. "After all, I don't go to TJ or Exeter; I've never been part of a math team; no one at school shares my interests; I had to do everything myself. Why don't people appreciate how difficult it is for me and my hard work?" As you can see, these kinds of thoughts, while excellent excuses, didn't get me far. I drowned in classes, not because of me incapable of getting A's, but because memorizing the New Deal programs felt like intellectual abuse and went against my values. I developed cynicism towards the system I'm in.

I realized that the above is a pessimistic way to think about success. This year, I realized, I needed an attitude makeover.

My psychological healing began with the words of Prince Ea.

is my favorite video thus far.

In this video, he gave an astonishing fact - not all of the most successful people thrived from their education system and were born with a set trajectory to success. 75% of the most successful people actually suffered some form of abuse as a child, a stark contrast to my image of successful people.

I realized, almost all of the most successful people went through phases of conflict, depression, fear, desire to give up, but what separated these people from others who drowned is that they learned to adapt and persist through their source of troubles, and ultimately come up on top to become a leader.

Moreover, these levels of success come from a sense of "why." While discipline and the ability to stick to a set routine and schedule may help you get that 4.0, the highest level of success can only be achieved if you have a greater sense of purpose that comes from the heart.

For my life, I would say as of now my motivation comes from two sources:
a) passion for problem solving
b) a genuine desire to self actualize

I realize that while my path is unconventional to that of my peers, the best I can do is to keep steering forward using the above two sources of motivation, and unleashing whatever I have to offer in my gas tank so that I could, hopefully, leave this high school having improved the overall mathematics culture of the school for the better.

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All the above, hopefully, explains why I found the guts to make the AoPS video and step onto a stage and talk to a cringing crowd of ~700 people.

Here's the link to my video that was shown to the school last Monday in front of basically everyone in the high school, a solid 10 hour investment of my life.

Here's how it went down at the actual assembly.

Aside from a few burns, the overall attitude seems to be positive??

On the other hand, my tutee list is also getting extremely long (apparently tutees spread the word at light speed). While the process of teaching is esp. satisfying (today, I explained to a precalc student WHY the x-coord of a vertex of a quadratic is -b/2a, and he jumped out of his seat when he understood it) < 3. I've also been offered a few paid tutoring positions, all of which I've passed up on

...so I can actually have time to do math myself.

I'm hoping to finish Lemmas (almost 2/3 done) by winter. My other addictions have been PFTB and SFTB, which when combined is richer than every book I've encountered in the past, though I occasionally pick up a few fun problems from the 100 series, though 105+108+109, my source of algebra problems, can get dreadfully boring and demoralizing when the more obscure problems are presented without motivation. As for WOOT, I'm hoping to dedicate this entire weekend to knocking out as many combo problems as I can as the combo quarter is ending (which turned out to be really fun actually). I'm thinking of Pranav Sriram's Combo book as a logical next step after this.

Anyways, that's it for now. Comments, positive or negative, are always welcome.