4 Important Skills to Learn While in High School

I sometimes have students come up to me and ask, "What should I learn and get out of my high school years?" As an ambitious mentor, I was troubled when asked this question because there were simply too many things I wanted them to learn in high school. I remember my poor student leaving my session overwhelmed because I've shared too much with her than necessary. Then, I thought that it would be worthwhile to come up with my own 4 important skills to learn while in high school, which I'd like to share with you all.

1. INTERPERSONAL SKILLS

When I was in high school, I’ve had my parents, pastors, senior university students tell me that high school years are very worth taking advantage of because you are exposed to a ton of networks, opportunities, and experiences while having lots of free time and lots of youth energy to engage in many different things at once. Some of them told me that college or university is similar except you have more responsibilities and probably won’t have as much free time due to heavier course loads and other commitments (But, I will also cover "Important Skills to Learn While in College/University" in a separate blog post).

Now, I believe that one of the important skills to have in life in general are good interpersonal skills, and I deem high school years to be the optimal time to be mindful of it and work on it. I don’t mean to say this in a serious and heavy manner where you must always be seeking out people and mingling all the time when you don’t want to. Instead, what I want to encourage you to do is to join clubs, try out for athletic teams, volunteer, reach out to your teachers and peers, work part-time, and really expose yourself to as many diverse groups and experiences as possible.

First reason is it will tremendously help with your ability to deal with many different people and help form deep and meaningful relationships in the process. There are many studies now that indicate that human happiness and quality of life are greatly linked with whether you have deep and meaningful relationships or not. So, your attention and work on interpersonal skills will allow you to form such relationships to improve your overall satisfaction in life and become a healthier student that is motivated to strive for the best. Also, you will learn ways to have people like you and want to get to know you, and this will become very important as you progress through your academic career and ultimately enter the “real world”.

Another reason is that through your interpersonal skills and interacting with others, you will learn more about yourself. Some of those things may include:

A. What I like and don’t like

B. What sort of person I am in a group setting (e.g. loud vs. quiet, dominant vs. shy, humorous vs. serious, etc.)

C. What types of people I like and dislike (e.g. fun vs. quiet and serious people, dominant vs. submissive people, confident vs. shy people, etc.)

D. My weaknesses and strengths (e.g. Fast vs. slow learner, athletic vs unathletic, patient vs. impatient, etc.)

To sum it up, your interpersonal skills will allow you to learn more about people and about yourself. Take these skills with you to wherever you plan to go after graduating high school (it’s also okay if you don’t know right now).

2. EXPERIENCE IN ORGANIZING AND LEADING

You don’t have to be the most charming leader who mesmerizes everyone, but all I am saying is to gain a bit of experience in organizing and leading something, whatever it may be. It could be something as trivial as suggesting a restaurant to go to and taking your group of friends or your class out to it. Other examples are perhaps organizing a friendly tennis tournament within your school or hosting a food fight event at the cafeteria for entertainment or hosting a music concert people can come to and enjoy. The reason why such experiences are important is because you will be given the opportunity or be put on the spot to lead something at some point, especially as a student striving for success. And when comes this chance, you don’t want to back out due to lack of leadership experience because it may be something that could bring about positive change in your life. For me, I had my student council supervisor suggest that I create my own Tennis Club at the school as he was willing to help me through the process. I already had ample experience in organizing and leading some friendly tennis sessions with my friends, so I immediately accepted his suggestion and became the president of the club at the time. To this day, I mark this one of my greatest achievements in high school. Again, you don’t need experience in organizing and leading some next-level, high-impact events, but just be familiar with what it’s like to organize and lead and have these skills in your toolbox.

3. MENTAL HIIT

As a generation of instant gratification and immediate access to pretty much everything on the Web, our attention span and ability to focus have diminished most certainly and significantly. Frankly, I find myself tempted to check my phone notifications as I am writing this, but thanks to the mental HIIT I practiced over many years, I am now very comfortable with intensely focusing on my work for a set number of hours without having to hide away or lock up my phone somewhere.

You’ve probably heard of HIIT, which stands for High-intensity Interval Training, and it is a workout where you designate a set number of seconds or minutes for intense activity followed by a break. For instance, HIIT on the treadmill could be comprised of 2 minutes of running as fast as you can followed by a 15-second walk. It is a widely practiced exercise with ample evidence on its benefits. Now, like HIIT, I’ve developed and practiced my own mental HIIT whereby I appoint a set number of hours for intense focus on work followed by a break. Personally, I’ve tried up to 4 hours of straight studying without any breaks, but I found that 2 hours was a good HIIT interval for me. This is because I found myself taking too long of a break after the intense 4-hour studying, and I also found it unmotivating to be going back to another round of excessively long studying session. My mental HIIT to this day is comprised of 2-hour intense focus followed by a 15–30-minute break, depending on how urgent the work needs to be done.

Now, the reason why I want you to develop this awesome skill in high school is the longer you practice the better you get at it. I personally developed my mental HIIT during my university years and I thought it was a bit late because it takes time to get good at it and because the workload was quite overwhelming from Day 1 in university. Developing your own mental HIIT will better prepare you for college or university if you plan on going to one.

4. READING SKILLS

I am talking about this last because I know the word “reading” will instantly make you yawn and lose focus (Kudos for reading this far). I want to emphasize that academic success partially boils down to how well you can absorb and apply any given material. Now, how quickly you absorb a given material depends on how efficiently and effectively you can read. Thus, developing good reading skills in high school is important to maximize your learning and improve your efficiency. If you’ve been a long-time reader and are confident with your level, then keep it up and ensure that you keep this habit going because learning is life-long. If you are not so much a reader and aren’t confident with it, it isn’t too late to start and work on improving the skills now. I only really began to read in university and became confident with my reading skills way later. Obviously to improve your reading, you need to read. However, it is also important to select a good reading material because your time is money and good books are better at motivating you to finish them.

Now, I’d like to share some tips that will help improve your reading:

1. Goodreads.com – there is a ton of sponsored websites that promote books for advertisements, and it is sometimes hard to tell if they are actually nominated for their quality. Unlike these, Goodreads.com is the website that helped me pick out the right books. You can refer to tabs like “Best Books 2022” to help you select your reading material.

2. Reading Comprehension Workbooks – There are lots of available workbooks that help put your reading to the test. Personally, I found these books helpful as they honed my skills in quickly summarizing paragraphs and picking out key points to answer questions. SPECTRUM has good reading comprehension workbooks sorted out by grade levels. You can easily purchase them on Amazon.

3. The Economist – There are subscriptions you can purchase to get your hands on quality reading material. I’ve personally subscribed to the Economist in the past and found them helpful in improving my reading, especially because they covered a wide range of topics.

Last Few Words

There is obviously much more I want to say on important skills to learn while in high school. However, I’ve picked out the TOP 4 I thought was of utmost importance that I would hone in on if I could go back to those years. At the end of the day, you need good discipline in order to develop good interpersonal skills, gain experience in organizing and leading, train your mental HIIT, and improve your reading skills. And with these skills in your toolbox, it will help get you closer to achieving your goals in the future.