If one thing is certain, it’s that there needs to be a instruction manual for incoming high-school freshman - how to do this, when to do that, what’s important and what’s not going to matter in ten years - because we all know that it would save everyone a whole lot of time and effort. Unfortunately though, there isn’t. Kids are left to learn manual-worthy lessons on their own; some lessons are learned by experience, some by association, and some simply by observance. Over the course of four years, high school can fill that theoretical manual pretty full, but perhaps the most important lesson one could learn from that manual may not be realized until late in the high-school career, or even afterward: to not let high school be the center of the universe.