I'm doing my dream job which is producing and directing documentaries in the developing world. I did this and two weeks ago I won an Emmy for this. Also was promoted this year to becoming Series Editor for one of the leading current affairs strands in the UK and we are about to finish our first run.

Any success I have I can trace back to having been an A student all throughout high school - the skills required for that included: strong literacy and numeracy skills, the capacity to grasp something quickly, willingness to work hard and go the extra mile to be the best, even if it meant waking up much earlier or staying up much later. The other key thing that helped I think is that I started shooting and editing films at a very young age, I was around eight, so by now it feels second nature to me.

What I have to stress is that getting straight As helped simply in instilling in me a particularly way of approaching work, not in the sense of sending me to any prestigious college, which never happened. I arrived in London 15 years ago and as far as everyone was concerned, getting straight As from the small country I came from was meaningless, there was no conversion table to say what the equivalent grades would be in the UK and most people looking at me wondered, some actually asked, whether I could read and write in English. I had to work my way up from minimum wage jobs in a country where I had no friends or family and zero contacts.

So, if any kid out there is working really hard, getting straight As and wondering whether that will help them at all in life, my answer is that yes potentially it will, as long as you put those skills at work in a focused direction. Tell yourself what you want to do with your life and list the concrete steps you will take to reach that goal and make sure every day you take at least one those steps, even if it's small, even if it's scary (particularly if it's scary).