I was in boarding school from the age of 9-15 in the UK. For me, it was an absolutely horrific experience. I was physically and emotionally abused and bullied

I was in boarding school from the age of 9-15 in the UK. For me, it was an absolutely horrific experience. I was physically and emotionally abused and bullied for the entire time I was there due to being very obviously sensitive and an easy target. I did not do well at academics of any kind because I was mainly dealing with the emotional effects and also just didn't "get" it. My only pass was in art, which I didn't really like and was not very good at everything else was a fail. I was pretty sure that I was stupid and was not academic at all. They had a computer lab with BBC Model B and I tried some basic coding and I was not interested in it. I left school at 15 and then travelled around Europe and came back to London where I spent a few years working high street jobs (shoe shop sales, etc). Then, when I was 18 a friend of mine got me a job as a courier at a firm of architects (1987). They had Macs and I became interested because I had a go and I seemed to understand how to use them. I made a few newsletters for the company in Quark Express. Feeling kind of cocky I BS'd my way into a Tech Support position at an Apple store in London. After a year working there I was enjoying helping customers. I even made a few experiments in Hyper Card and realized I quite liked computers. A few years later "the internet" happened and I wanted to make a "chat" site, so I learned "C" because I was obsessed that I needed to learn "the absolute fastest language" to write a cgi script. (the irony, the html cgi chat script executed instantaneously but took aaaages to get around the internet and down peoples modems) Anyway, I kept coding, moved to perl, then php, then javascript, then mobile and now I love all things computers. Long story short, I was able to have a career in spite of school not because of it. For me, school was the worst experience of my life. When I look back on it I see a dark time in a sort of psychological prison that lasted for years. I find it hard to think of school in a positive light and that might be why one of my roles is being CTO of a company that's main goal is to modernize education. For me, I only started to be inquisitive and learn "anything" after I had been out of the school environment for 3 years. I no longer think I am stupid or unable to do anything academic. I plan on revisiting Math one day when I have gotten all this entrepreneurial stuff out of my system.