 Will and Karen had been fully committed to each other since they were 15. Now seniors, they are even in agreement on their eventual marriage. They decided to wait, so both could go on to college as a way to have a better chance for a prosperous life together. The subject is investment. It is accepting a present cost in order to secure a future benefit. Will and Karen both are willing to put their future on hold together while they invest in higher education. For performance, their potential to marry and to get on with life as a couple was a value they set aside in order to achieve an increase in their individual potentials as college graduates. All your student commitments of time and effort are investments. There are expenditures of your time and energy on learning as a way to increase your ability as an educated adult. And each investment requires an abandonment of other things that you might do now in order to secure a promised future benefit. Your investment in education is a value transaction and you are the primary party in interest. As a teenager, you are the one who increasingly decides where and where you will apply your efforts. Investments are built on expectation, which is a problem for the young. Time and energy are the resources and are readily available. The challenge is in having good expectations for the value that education will provide you in the future. This is why earlier education was entrusted to parents and teachers. It is also why as teenagers, you now find decisions put more and more into your hands. You are learning to be an adult. You be the one who makes the investments, even as you learn more specific lessons that are being taught. You are being prepared more effectively to evaluate your own future potentials. While your parents and teachers have hopes concerning what you will learn and value and how effective you will be in achieving what you value as an adult, their purpose has to include you increasingly assuming authority to direct your own efforts. We have to support and encourage you to assume your role as an adult member of society. No matter how much they may want for you, the simple truth is that the time and effort are yours and you, as the owner of yourself, are the final decision maker when it comes to when and where you will make your commitments. The final investment decision will be yours. The limit of presentation such as this is that no amount of implied intelligence or concern on my part can make decisions for you. I do not value what you value. I am not the owner of your time and energies. My role as a performance engineering professional is to provide technical support to you for the purpose of supporting your intelligent decisions. Much of what I can provide are historical distillations, approaches and techniques that have worked for people in the past, and perspectives that can serve you in better seeing your own future potentials. The same can be seen in terms of supporting your parents and teachers who also serve your deeper purpose in growing to be an effective adult. That is the result that you can trust as motivation, for it benefits everyone who takes part. And you will also come to evaluate and support what I am providing. When it is your children who are teenage students, you will either affirm its usefulness or encourage other directions. They in turn will be children who are receiving educational support from you, where today it is all about you, tomorrow it will be all about them. As a younger child, most of what you invested in education was based on faith in parents and teachers. As a teenager, you will be required to start taking personal responsibility for more and more of your own investments. Your parents and teachers will still be there for guidance and for support, but you will become more and more responsible for accepting their guidance or stepping in new directions. My technical guidance for you is that you should always be looking to learn. If you see some alternative that has good potential, gather information about it as you are able, especially from parents and teachers who share your deeper purpose. If the direction has good potential, I would promote your testing of new things while you are young and resilient. Test with smaller decisions first, where you invest little. Allow practice before you make larger commitments that can have more significant impact on your future. Do not be shy about testing things, for that is one of the ways we learn. As a result of your expenditure, you will either be successful or you will learn.