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Top ten things I've learned from high-school

Studying smart instead of hard is a myth. Studying smart will make life less hard for you but studying will always be hard. You're learning something new and eventually things will start to get unintuitive. It takes hard work to get this new, unintuitive idea and fit it into your broader understanding of the world. For things like math, you get good by constantly failing and fixing your mistakes. Practice problem after practice problem. If you want to get bad grades, you can study hard. If you want to get okay grades, you can study smart. If you want to get amazing grades, you have to study smart and hard.
About 5-10% of your grades are dependent on the teachers perception of you. The more competent you seem to the teacher and the more they like you, the more likely you're going to get into the top 1% in terms of grades for whatever class you're taking. This especially matters in English and socials courses.
No amount of study hacks and length of study can make up for bad mental and physical health. I needed to stay active and mindful in order to do well in every aspect of my life. Health precedes wealth and wisdom.
Saying your goals to other people is setting yourself up for failure. If you don't complete those goals, people start to think of you as the person who isn't able to follow through. If you do, people start to have high-expectations of you and you'll have a hard time maintaining those high-expectations.
It's better to do less than you can at a high and healthy rate, than to do as much or greater than you are able and risk burnout
Opportunities are everywhere. As long as you know your limits, make sure to say yes to as many opportunities as you can. The goal is to open as many doors as possible during graduation. Apply yourself, apply to those scholarships, apply to those colleges.
The biggest enemy to success isn't a person but distractions. You could have the most perfect plan for your school year, but if you let distractions take over, it'll all just collapse underneath you. Distractions range from your phone, to needless drama. Protect your energy, don't try to moderate distractions, cut them out.
The world rewards proactivity. Be proactive in all aspects of your life. Especially social. There's this big meme about things not making out the group chat. That only happens because everyone's too scared to set things into motion. If you have an Idea, go through with it. You and everyone else will be happy that you did. For example, I realized me and a couple friends lived in very close vicinity to a library. We were all in the same class and had a test coming up. I thought, I wondered if we can all just study together. Instead of just leaving it at that thought, I created a group chat and instead of asking everyone if they would be free, I just put in this one-liner: Study sesh @ library Sunday at 2? Bam. Suddenly it was no longer a logistics problem, It was just a simple, can I make it or can I not question to them. Everything problem is just a friction problem. If you want to be more social, just make it frictionless for people to do so. We didn't have to decide a date together, we didn't have to decide a time together, we didn't have to decide the location, and we didn't have to decide what we were going to do. Everything was in that line. Another example is in an English project I had to do. This was a massive project (in high-school standards). It was supposed to take the whole semester to complete. I decided, Instead of waiting until the last minute like 99% of people who did and would do this project, I planned to work on the project daily and finish a rough draft of it a couple of weeks before the deadline. Now, I had weeks to review and perfect the project. The teacher said we could ask anyone to edit our project and I asked, can you edit mine? If I had asked that the day before it was due, she would have said no, because she would have been asked that by the rest of the class and has to mark a bunch of stuff. Since I had asked a couple of weeks before, though. She was more than happy to edit my work. I had her edit it made the corrections, and handed in the final project a week before the deadline. She was very impressed at my time-management and since she edited it herself, I got a perfect score on the project. Proactivity does wonders.
School is what you make of it. There are somethings you can't change, but your experience of school can be greatly impacted by just a shift in perspective. For me, school was a fun place where I could hang-out with my friends and learn about cool things. Most would often say things like "I hate school" and come to school with their highest priority being how they can get through it expending the least-amount of effort possible. If you come to school like that, then obviously school is going to be horrible. Sometimes there are life situations that can throw things off at school, and I understand that. I've personally gone through some life-circumstances that negatively impacted my school experience. I still tried my best to get the most out of school, though. It was the constant pursuit of getting the most out of school while also being as proactive as I could be that got me to the place I am today. I ended off with a 97% GPA, savings (which I got from working part-time and saving) , and basically a full ride to one of my target universities. This all happened because I kept setting myself up for success and being proactive about my time, resources, and opportunities.
Failure is a greater teacher than success. High-school is a perfect opportunity to test your limits and fail. You get the most out of high-school by trying your hardest, failing, learning from your failure, and trying again. This goes for basically everything in life, not just high-school.
Everything you do doesn't have to be for a greater motive. Remember to enjoy the moment, you'll never be this young, and free of responsibilities. Even if the responsibilities are already stacking up, take time to go for a walk or something everyday and just be in the moment. It the little things in life like the smell of flowers and the feeling of the breeze that make up life. If you don't take a break from the constant business to appreciate the little things, you'll lose your grounding and eventually burnout. A lot of expectations are placed upon high-schoolers and at times, it can feel incredibly overwhelming. Don't just "thug it out" though, take a breather here and there.