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Choosing a Stream at Sixteen · Lesson 4 of 4

A better way to decide

Work backwards from evidence rather than forwards from preference. Find three people doing the work you think you might want, ask them what a Tuesday looks like, and ask what they would need to do if they had to start again today. Half an hour each. Almost nobody does this, and it is the single highest-return thing available to you at this age.

Then choose the stream that keeps the courses those three people named reachable, and write down what you decided and why. In two years, when you are choosing again under exam pressure, that note will be worth more than your memory of this decision — which will have quietly rewritten itself to sound more certain than it was.

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