Learn how to break down a problem when you're stuck.

When I was ~10, I tried to get my TRS-80 (yikes I'm old) to display something like the star wars death star on its primitive graphics. I got pretty far, thanks to the trig examples in the manual. But I was flummoxed that my degree measurements yielded crazy sin/cos results. I felt crushed. Some years later I learned about radians. I often think back how my life trajectory might have been different had I known something simple: how to break problems down.

Knowing to read the manual at that age may have proven invaluable in the future.

HP calculator manuals used to be really useful for teaching that.

As I get older I am starting to think that there are some things people just aren’t ready to learn at a given moment in time.

I kept all of my engineering textbooks and there have been concepts in them that never made sense when they were taught in school but ten years later I re-read them and things click like they never did when I was learning them years ago.

I think one of the tragedies of the public schools is that all the kids are expected to learn certain things at specific ages and grade levels, and for some kids they’re just not quite ready.

That doesn’t mean they won’t be ready in the future. But they will get a failing grade and the associated feeling of “I must be dumb.” And I think that often changes the trajectory of their lives as you described, often in negative ways.