I Stole Highlighters From My Dad's Bag. It Was the Best Thing That Happened to Me.

I stole highlighters from my dad’s office bag.

He brought them home from work and I needed them for revision. We couldn’t afford the multicoloured sets the other kids had and the organised post-it systems. Shared revision guides or hand me downs were the deal.

My parents didn’t believe you couldn’t study because your tools were bad. You studied with what you had. If the house was noisy, which it often was, you learned to focus through noise. If you didn’t have the perfect setup, you made do with what existed.

I didn’t know the term then, but there’s a concept called contextual interference: you learn better when conditions are messy, variable, imperfect. Athletes train in noise so they can perform in stadiums. Musicians practise with distractions so they don’t fall apart on stage.

I was getting that training for free. Not by choice though, by necessity and because my parents were firmly in the tough love camp.

It turned out to be one of the best things that happened to me.

My clients tend to have everything: resource-wise.

The newest iPad. The perfect stationery. Noise-cancelling headphones. A dedicated study space. Apps for productivity, apps for focus, apps for habit-tracking. Every resource at their fingertips. There’s no arguing that resources can most certainly improve productivity, efficiency and overall progress, but at some point, diminishing marginal returns set in.

More important than that though, is the fact that…

Many of them can’t execute.

When you give a child everything, you remove friction. That feels like love. Why would you want your child to struggle with inadequate tools? It also makes sense that society has moved forward and such tools have become much cheaper and it’s a no-brainer to use things at your disposal.

That said, friction taught me something these students never learned: execution matters more than systems, not always, but when you’re getting started. You don’t need the perfect setup. The pretty notes are worthless if you never test yourself and the colour-coded schedule becomes a piece of art if you don’t follow it.

Students who grew up with friction understand this in their bones. They don’t overthink. They just execute. Grittiness has become a part of them because it was a requirement.

Students who grew up with abundance often don’t. They’ve been trained to optimise inputs, not outputs. They confuse preparation with progress.

The right tools don’t save anyone. The work saves you.

A student came to me after disappointing GCSEs. Plenty of resources, support and time. On paper, everything was in place for perfect grades.

In practice, they took two hours to start working. First, cleaning their desk. Then finding the “right” section to revise. One mistake on the notes meant rewriting them from scratch. Then laying out stationery. Making tea. Making coffee. Choosing a playlist. No, making a playlist. By the time they actually began, half the evening was gone.

They needed total silence. They needed the exact right environment.

They’d been given so much that they’d never developed the muscle to work without it. The abundance had trained them to depend on conditions, not to create results regardless of conditions.

We stripped it all back. Fewer tools and greater execution. Removing half the unnecessary distractions between thinking about work and starting work. They had to learn what scrappy kids learn early: done is better than perfect and conditions are never ideal.

It’s not suffering and it’s not deprivation.

It’s the understanding that execution beats preparation. That you don’t need to wait for the perfect moment. Explaining why the student who starts with a messy plan will beat the student who’s still perfecting their approach.

Scrappy students think in MVPs. Minimum viable product. They submit the rough draft to get feedback. They start the project before they feel ready. They’d rather have something imperfect out in the world, learning from it, than something perfect still sitting on their desk.

Abundant students think in launches. Everything must be polished before anyone sees it. The draft isn’t ready. The plan isn’t finished. The conditions aren’t right. They’re still preparing while the scrappy kid is already on version three.

The scrappiest students I’ve seen weren’t the ones with the least. They were the ones who’d learned, somewhere along the way, that resources don’t produce results. Work produces results. Work can happen in imperfect conditions, tools and circumstances.

That’s the edge your child might be missing. Not more resources. More hunger.

Look at your child’s study setup. The tools, the environment, the systems.

Now ask: could they produce the same results with half of it? Could they function if conditions weren’t ideal?

If you’ve spent years removing friction, you may have also removed the training that builds resilience. The ability to focus through noise. The ability to start without perfect preparation. The ability to get results when everything isn’t handed to them.

You can’t buy that. You can only build it. Sometimes, building it means taking something away.

I stole highlighters because I had to. Your child might need to learn what it feels like to make do.

Teresa Song is the founder of Nova Scholars, which teaches strategic thinking and decision architecture for students navigating competitive systems.