Learn something that will never be on a test. That’s the stuff that makes you interesting.

Required learning is shared, which means it does not distinguish you from anyone else who sat the same exams. What you picked up because you wanted to is the part nobody else has in the same combination, and it is usually what makes you good company and occasionally what makes you useful. It has no obvious payoff, which is exactly why so few people accumulate any.

Follow one interest this season that leads nowhere professional. Birds, the history of a street, how bridges stay up. Nothing has to come of it, and something often does.