Scrolling Through Your Own Brain

School often feels like a marathon of mandatory, irrelevant tasks. By the time you finish the homework you don't care about, your brain is fried. It’s no wonder the default setting for so many of us is collapsing onto a bed and mindlessly scrolling. It’s not laziness; it’s an escape from exhaustion. We burn out on things we aren't curious about, so we use our free time to just forget about it all.

Olympic freeskier Eileen Gu approaches her free time entirely differently. She isn't just an athlete who mastered gravity; she's someone who actively masters her own thoughts. She describes herself as an introspective person who spends a lot of time in her own head—not spiraling with anxiety, but actively exploring.

Instead of letting her thoughts happen to her, Eileen acts like a scientist in a workshop. She journals. She breaks down her thought processes. She analyzes how she thinks and modifies it. She calls it "tinkering" with her brain the exact same way she tinkers with her free skiing tricks. She explores what she has learned, what is meaningful, and what isn't.

The secret weapon here is neuroplasticity—the brain's physical ability to rewire itself. At your age, your brain is highly adaptable. You actually have the power to control what you think, how you think, and ultimately, who you become.

It's the ultimate rebellion against a system that wants you to just memorize facts and then numb out. By taking control of the workshop in your head, you get to build the exact person you want to be. As Eileen puts it, the biggest flex of all time isn't winning a gold medal—it's becoming the kind of person your 8-year-old self would be absolutely obsessed with.