I was at a mixer event recently and met the next generation — one of those rooms full of young people finding their way into the working world. Name tags. Slightly careful conversations. Everyone clocking who looks settled and who still looks like they’re figuring it out.
Standing there, I noticed how my path into adulthood had been slightly different.
Not better in some absolute sense. Just different. And maybe, in the ways that matter for how you engage with people, better than it might have been — because of my teacher. My mum.
She homeschooled my brother and me from Year 1 through Year 10. Every childhood has trade-offs. Ours meant we got thrown into situations with people older, sharper, and further ahead — and expected to keep up. We didn’t always relate easily to kids our own age. Forming those connections was sometimes hard. What we did get was a different muscle: how to speak and engage with people who weren’t peers.
We’ve kind of messed up how we look at education. It’s never really been about memorising a stack of facts. It’s about waking up an appetite to learn — the hunger that keeps going after the timetable ends.
The formula is almost annoyingly simple:
Exposure + Imagination = Ambition
Exposure is the underrated one. Put yourself in environments that aren’t your default. Different ages. Different intellects. Different rooms. If your world stays small, your ceiling stays small — quietly.
Homeschooling did that for us, whether we liked it or not. We weren’t wrapped in a peer bubble. That can feel uneven when you’re young. It also trains you to stop waiting for the room to come down to your level.
Imagination is what you do with the exposure. You see someone further along, and you don’t just clock the gap — you start sketching what’s possible. Without imagination, exposure is tourism. With it, you rewrite your map.
Ambition shows up after that. Not as a poster on the wall. As a byproduct. Once you’ve seen more of what’s possible, drive has somewhere to point.
Could that path have gone sideways? Sure. Different doesn’t automatically mean better. In our case, mum’s way of bringing us up set both of us up as pretty engaged, skilled adults — comfortable in rooms that intimidate many people our age.
I’m still living this out. Still choosing rooms that stretch me. Still catching myself when everything gets too familiar and my sense of the possible starts to shrink.
If ambition feels stuck, the fix might not be “try harder.” It might be: get exposed to something that doesn’t fit your current map — then let your imagination do the rest.
What would one week of better exposure change? Who might you meet and become?
Cheers,
NB
Kids don’t just need to be told what’s possible; they need to see it up close. Sounds like those homeschooling years gave you that exposure early, and ambition followed.