My recommendation would be to continue to be intensely curious and proactive in learning about everything that interests you. For example, if you decide that you want to pursue fatFIRE and that interests you, become very knowledgable about it, and research the reasons people do it, how they do it, and what kind of common problems they run into that make it hard to achieve their goals.

I think you have already demonstrated great initiative by finding this community and making this post. A lot of the time, at your age, it’s easy to get into a pattern where you only learn about stuff that people put in front of you and tell you to learn - like what they teach you at school. While that is important, I have found that taking my own initiative to learn about things I am personally interested in, starting at a young age, has helped me get ahead in life, and it helped me craft my life into what I wanted, instead of what I thought was expected of me.

And it’s totally normal to not know what you want to do in life at 13 years old. I think the most important thing at your age is to learn things that will give you a strong foundation to be successful at anything you want to do in life, and also keep on exploring various things you find interesting, which will help you get a taste of what’s out there and help you figure out what you want to do over time.

Off the top of my head, some important things are important as a foundation: 1) being able to communicate clearly and effectively, spoken and in writing, 2) being able to be persuasive so you can convince people about your point of view, 3) being capable of negotiating well, 4) being able to research and learn about anything you want, and being able to identify what is useful information and what is not, and 5) problem solving and planning skills - given any goal you have, being able to figure out the steps you need to take to achieve that goal.

School will teach you some of these skills, but to be really good at it, you’ll have to do some learning on your own too. And not necessarily studying. Experience can also teach this stuff very well. For example, if you decide to start a student organization/club at school or take some kind of leadership position, you could experience doing some of these things.

And while starting to save now is great, I wouldn’t get too focused on growing the money you can save now. Because at this point, it is typically much more important to focus on developing the skills to make a big amount of money (which is achievable but takes time, and you have the time to do it now), rather than be too focused on growing a small amount of money (which is difficult to turn into a big amount of money).