I was pretty good at math competitions (2x putnam fellow) but never that great at being a mathematician. But I still think math competitions are great experienc

I was pretty good at math competitions (2x putnam fellow) but never that great at being a mathematician. But I still think math competitions are great experience. Winning at any sort of competition teaches you how to be persistent, how to work hard, how to recover from setbacks mentally, how to maintain focus for a long period of time, and how to gear up for critical moments where you need to perform. For example, when I first went to the math olympiad summer program, I had trouble focusing on a single math problem that I had no clue how to solve for three hours straight. It's hard! The training program basically forces you to do that over and over, so I ended up learning a lot of how to focus for large chunks of time and do useful things to attack a problem that I didn't initially know how to solve. I went into computer stuff instead of math stuff after college, and there's a lot of stuff I never used again. Algebraic topology, all the geometry theorems they don't teach you in high school, you name it. But the ability to work really hard on a single technical problem until you nail it, that's been constantly useful. Especially in startups.