Yet another post on learnings by a student who completed his UG, and gearing up for change in life. However, the experience which I had is statistically unique, and hopefully you’ll get to know something that you haven’t come across elsewhere. So yeah, here we go. (Although, there aren’t any guarantees that this was my final stint as a student, but at least I am done with my bachelors)
Priorities
Personally, I am of the opinion that you should have an informal goal post for yourself when you start your college life, and you should review your time expenditure so that you are working towards your goal. However, if you are here for exploration, and in that case, your goal post changes, then it isn’t the end of the world, but you need to make peace with the opportunity costs associated, rather than stressing out for reasons such as your friends’ and colleagues’ achievements, expectations of others from you, etc. So priorities, although informal should be there in my honest opinion.
Peer Pressure and FOMO is Real
Believe it or not, (maybe even admit it or not) but this is out in the open! Personally speaking, there were times when I took decisions due to this and they were indeed sub-optimal, but fortunately the effects weren’t that significant. The main point here I want to convey is that one needs to recognize this, and if things are spiralling way out of control then mitigate it! This is where your own ownership, your own principles, ethics etc for your life come up.
Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is another such thing which can drain you mentally (for sure!) and perhaps physically too. It might indeed be difficult to ignore the popular opinion and go with the flow (obviously wisdom of crowds), but what I’d recommend is not to dwell in useless thoughts, killing your PrEcIoUs TiMe, ruining your efficiency and productivity.
Mental Time and Space
The first time I heard about this, that really was a sad state for me back then. However, now in hindsight, when I do think about it is quite apt. Having thoughts about multiple things at the same time detoriates your productivity, drains your energy (don’t know how, but yes) and it was really hard for me to correct things, but fortunately I am experiencing tangible differences about this as compared to my earlier self. Focus (complete) on the task at hand is quintessential. I think it would really help if you are able to identify the different things which you think about during the working day, and hopefully eliminate the unnecessary ones.
Nature and Karma
Everything that happens to you, happens for your good (am still trying to convince myself about certain happenings!). This really helps, I ain’t sure how contested this theory is, but certainly it’d help you prevent quite some mental energy drain! And boy, it can really be difficult at times to convince yourself as the reasons may not be revealed immediately, although you should be able to get your answers in future. As I said earlier, there are some experiences which actually make me wonder, how much more the stars need to align for some things to happen, but here I am with my restricted worldview or sample space so to say, still wasting fractions of my mental energy about it, but there’s hope that, I’d master this skill someday.
Also, you should be comfortable to accept the fact that if someone’s objectively better than you at some thing, then it cannot be luck all the time. That individual would have devoted time and energy practising and mastering, which you wouldn’t have. Regression to the mean ensures that if you perform better than what was expected, you’d end up with inferior results elsewhere to ensure that your overall performance kind of averages out. So, work to improve your own mean, competiting with yourself instead of others. I agree this is easier said than done, and the system needs to be developed in a way that’d facilitate this, but it could also help you if you are conscious about this.