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I went to an elite high school widely considered one of the best in the country, at a very different time, when the world was in a very different place. I will first answer the question in the context of the period in which I attended, then I’ll discuss the long-term effect on my personal and professional life, and finally I will give you the epilogue. But keep in mind that what I am describing here was a fundamentally different society…set in time somewhere between WW84 and the original Wonder Woman films, if you can imagine history going back that far. As such, while probably half of my experience is fully relevant today, the other half is a historical artifact. Teasing apart which aspects belong in which half is a question appropriate for a much longer discussion.THE SCHOOLI attended Horace Mann High School in New York City’s tony Riverdale section (home to other elite schools including Riverdale, Fieldston and Barnard). Routinely ranked as one of the top two or three private prep schools in the US, Horace Mann’s distinguished alumni include everyone from my father’s classmate Donald Newhouse to my classmate Elliot Spitzer, from Donald Trump’s Attorney General William Barr to Ambassador Donald Blinken, father of Joe Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken.The school itself has one of the finest physical campuses in New York, including baseball fields, tennis courts, aquatics center, indoor and outdoor running tracks, a Broadway-quality theater, stunning art center, science labs and computer facilities (“libraries” back in my day).THE FACULTYWith the preface once again that times were different, the HM faculty in my day was modeled to a large extent on that of tutors in a traditional English ‘public school’. It was a collection of some of the most remarkable and unusual people I have ever met—and I say that advisedly, having also attended both Yale and Columbia.Many of the faculty were truly larger than life figures, and most of them had lifelong impacts on their students. In seventh grade my General Language professor, Nathaniel Glidden, was a remarkable man: an heir to the Glidden paint fortune, he devoted his life to teaching. I guarantee that there is not a single student who took his class over his thirty year teaching career who cannot to this day recite from memory his “Words of the Day”, or sing the Schaeffer Beer jingle that he taught us. There is even a current Facebook group devoted to him—45 years after his passing—that has 284 active members. I have written about his iconoclastic teaching methods here before. To learn about “re-salable sleeping privileges” for example, see David S. Rose's answer to What can teachers do to stop students from sleeping during class?Other iconic professors of the the time included Alfred Baruth, who had taught my father as well as me and was a good friend of actor Richard Burton’s; Headmaster R. Inslee Clark, Jr. who came to HM after having integrated Yale as its revolutionary Dean of Admissions, whose class in Urban Affairs brought in the Mayor of New Haven to talk with us and was largely responsible for my eventual degree in that subject; English teacher Tek Young Lin, whose plant-filled classroom was a literary oasis and who taught us to curse creatively (“don’t just say ‘fuck you’, be erudite and say something like ‘go fuck a flying donut”); art teacher Ion Theodore, who had carried the torch for Greece in the Olympics and won the marathon in the 1928 Pan Hellenic Games; music department head Johannes Somary, a famous conductor and the music director of St. Patrick’s Cathedral; and many, many more.THE STUDENTS, THEN AND NOWWhen I was at Horace Mann from 1968–1975, I entered a school at the beginning of a period of dramatic transition. The student protests at Columbia and other schools the previous Spring were fresh in everyone’s minds, and indeed HM dropped its dress code (previously requiring jackets and ties) the year I entered. With a student body comprised primarily of extremely bright, motivated, upper middle class boys from mostly secular Jewish families, the assumption was that of course we would be going to college (100% of the class did) and most likely an Ivy League one (about half the class did).(I’m standing in the third row, second from right)The times were changing in other ways as well: the year we graduated was the first year the school admitted girls, and the year that Horace Mann extended its range from a boys’ high school to a coed K-12 with three campuses.Given the high intellectual level of the students, the intellectually rich aspirational level of most of their families, the extraordinary faculty and the school’s ample resources, Horace Mann at that time (and to an extent even to this day) could give most colleges a run for their money. It is safe to say that a typical HM graduate in my year entered college with the same education (or perhaps even better) than a majority of college students in America would have experienced after four years of higher education. Advanced Placement courses (rare for then) were offered in virtually every subject, and if your SAT scores were not at least in the 600–700 range you would have been considered an outlier (at 740/740 I was middle of the road; all my siblings each had single or double 800s).The effect of this truly world-class education during one’s formative years cannot be understated, especially as it was the last gasp of the “dead, white, male” version of a classical US/UK curriculum. My class entered the adult world with a rock-solid grounding in written and spoken English (from sentence diagramming to continuous feedback on our written work), science, history, and math, with a good smattering of college level elective courses in sociology, art, political science and other disciplines.The result is a group of men, now middle aged, who share a common frame of reference, a common set of knowledge, and a solid cross-disciplinary base of skills. For the most part they have led remarkably successful lives, pretty much along the lines they would have anticipated back in high school. While I am the one entrepreneur in the group (not atypical, given the 1% prevalence of natural entrepreneurs in the population), we have many dozens of doctors and lawyers, along with scientists, authors, professors, bakers, bankers, the founding head of Google University…and even a private investigator. For all of us, our six years at Horace Mann interacting with that extraordinary faculty left an indelible imprint that to a large extent set the tone and direction for our lives since then.Under normal circumstances this answer would end here. And indeed it would have if I had written this from the day I graduated up until nine years ago. But it doesn’t, because there is a terrible epilogue to the story that I didn’t telegraph to you up front because I wanted you to understand my prep school education in the way that I experienced it. But now, in full disclosure—and to shine a very, very different light on everything you’ve just read, sit down and keep reading…the rest of the story.EPILOGUEIn 2012 the New York Times Magazine published a blockbuster cover story that sent shockwaves throughout the city and turned upside down much that many people (including me) thought they knew. It instantly became front page headlines of every paper in the city, and many around the country:Based on the investigative work of journalist Amos Kamil, who was a student at Horace Mann a few years behind me, it revealed that during the period I was there (and for decades before and after) a significant number of the faculty (likely 20 or more) were sexually abusing an equally sizable number of students.These faculty members covered a wide range, from some mediocre teachers to several of the most brilliant, and their unforgivable actions ranged from purely evil rape and predation, to ‘gentle’ relationships that at least one who is still alive does not to this day understand was wrong. It turns out that I had the large majority of these abusers as my own teachers, and while I had not the slightest clue about the existence of the issue until I read the article, it is difficult now in retrospect to look back on the faculty in the same way I wrote earlier in this answer.Because I was not a victim (they apparently only preyed on troubled students from broken homes) my experiences at the time—and the impact that they had on my life—relate solely to their roles and activities as teachers. And in that respect, people like Clark, Lin, Theodore and others who so irretrievably damaged the lives of many other students, were among the finest teachers I have ever had. What a tragedy.Kamil eventually turned the Times story into an award-winning book that goes into great depth on what happened, including finding equivalent situations in many other well-known prep schools. For a full understanding of that issue in those times, his book is worth reading.Great Is the Truth: Secrecy, Scandal, and the Quest for Justice at the Horace Mann School, by Amos Kamil

(Note: see Which high schools did the Harvard Class of 2012 attend? for a more specific answer related to this question.)This takes some research. Based on student chatboards and other Quora sources (below), here's a rough sketch of the top feeder schools and whatever data I could find on #s:Boston Latin (~25 recently)Phillips Exeter (~ 20 per year, per Adam D'Angelo)Phillips Andover (~20 recently)Stuyvesant (12-15 recently; down from 20 historically)Hunter College HS (~12 recently)Deerfield Academy (8-12 recently)Thomas Jefferson HS (Virginia) (11 recently)Roxbury Latin (11 recently)Milton Academy (~10+ recently)Cambridge Rindge & Latin (10–12 recently; per Stavros Macrakis)Lexington High School (4-9 per year, per Alex Pollen)Harvard-Westlake (5-10 per year)Belmont Hill (9 recently) (per Charlie Cheever)Pasadena Polytechnic (~ 8 per year, ~10% of class)New Trier (8 recently) (per Joshua Forman)Choate (6-7)Trinity (NYC) (6-7 generally)St. Paul's (6 recently)Lawrenceville (5-6 recently)Groton (5-6 per year recently)Bergen County Academies (~4 per year)Bronx Science (4 recently)Regis (4 recently)Hopkins School (3-4)Dalton School (3-4 recently)Pine Crest (3-4 recently)Palo Alto High School (4-5, per Nat Brown)Maimonides (Boston) (~4 per year, per David Hammer)Shady Side Academy (1-2 recently; 4+ historically per Charlie Cheever)Bellarmine College Prep (2-4 recently; per User-13743967034596023228)Horace Mann (7-10 typically, per David S. Rose)Still need #sTrinityCollegiateNoblesCollege PrepBrearley

The biggest mistake in late 20s is being content.Early 20s is when you are still in college/university wrestling to find meaning in entropy.Mid 20s is when you are still trying to find your feet in the industry.Late 20s should be the time when you challenge yourself everyday. It's the time when you should not be contented with what you have.Yes, being contented with what you have is a good quality to have. But not one that you should be practicing when you are in late 20s."Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen."-Horace Mann