A letter to my much younger self on O Level results day: don't let people convince you these results don't matter. They do

Dear younger version of me,

I’ll make this brief because you should get back to preparing for your A-levels. Here goes then…

First, congratulations on passing all nine of your O-levels (which will one day be combined with CSEs and rebranded and devalued as GCSEs) – even scraping pass grades in French and Physics. How right you were to concentrate on mastering the few bits of each of those tricksy subjects you could actually understand, and trying to gain just minimal knowledge in the bits you didn’t have a clue about.

The really good news is that the “schoolboy French” you have now acquired will be all you ever need when you go there. All that hard work wasn’t wasted.

Second, you were right to subject yourself to all the stress and hard work that you did with an absurdly rigorous programme of homework and revision. Passing exams is actually an end in itself, because that is the general rule in life – you succeed at whatever you do and defeat is not an option. That is. as you’ve found, stressful, but life is stressful so you’d best get used to it.

Thirdly, don’t believe anyone who tells you that these exams don’t matter much. Especially if they went to Oxbridge and only decided to say that after graduating with fantastic results and a solid degree.

You certainly need decent grades in your O-levels to make a good start on your A-levels, both in the foundation of knowledge and in the sheer discipline of learning and the all-important British skill of passing examinations (in the absence of coursework and other soft/cheating options).

In that connection, you should also ignore any advice about fitting in at work being more important than brains, and proof of same (or the ability to simulate intelligence). Even if that were true – and you’ll generally find it isn’t – we both (old you/me and young you/me) know that that’s never going to be your strong point so you need to maximise the few comparative advantages you do possess.

Getting the knack of playing the examination game is the key to academic success, as you are discovering. You can’t do too much studying or revision.

Lastly, think of the terrifying alternatives. Getting good O-levels, then A-levels, and then a degree from a good university opens up all kinds of nice options.

Of course, if you wanted to do so you could leave school now and spend the rest of your life doing your vacation job of working at Walkers Crisps, cleaning down the machinery or picking burnt crisps off the production line. You could, in other words, spend the rest of your life smelling of various popular flavours – cheese and onion, smoky bacon, the new prawn cocktail ones. (The firm is still going strong in 2017). But you don’t really want to be doing that.

Unless you suddenly develop the level of skill required to become a professional footballer, athlete, golfer, ballet dancer, artist, entertainer, Formula 1 driver or something like that (and I can predict confidently that you won’t), then you’ll just have to knuckle down and get on with it, always remembering the ultimate shame is to fail an exam. The rest of the world may not, one day, care about it, but you will always resent it. So get back to your books.

All the best, and see you in 40 years.

Older Sean