Thank you for sharing your feelings OP. I can empathize with you, and wish you the very best.
Sometimes it's great reading how other people feel in these kinds of private situations that happen inside one's conscious.
You can't really discuss them with anyone else so when one person decides to let it all out (as OP did), I think its beneficial to EVERYONE who may have had or still have these kinds feelings/experiences.
This resonated well with myself, another student two weeks from graduating, with similar issues.
It helps to remind myself that Rome wasn't built in a day, and trying to do work that usually takes peers weeks in just a single night is just my immaturity coming through.
but we won't get better. Isolating ourselves and force-focus is not the key. I don't know a lot about the subject OP's referring to but to get good score all you need to do is understand things. Self study may not help at this time, have a friend over who is more or less like you but try and study together.
I'm just like OP. Recently I gave exams and if I hadn't had my friend over for studies then I would have failed. Now I'm getting a decent score.
I have learned something today, "To lose false confidence in me". You have opened my eyes.
I was fiddling with scripts and browsing all day long just before my physics exam. Can you believe it?
take_the_day_off creep negligence pleasure startled Angola
Far kings cowardice seldomness virgins referred candle
Cross mail over-anxiously rightful waters prelate sounds
vain grievous Guadeloupe law tend contradict gall slumber
woman's sess_me
----
Go find God, then come back. You know nothing. Less than nothing.
Fun fact, this guy made his own operating system. No, not Linux distribution. Not UNIX clone. Operating system. With windowing. In his own words:
TempleOS is 64-bit, flat, non-segmented and multi-cored. It's like a modern, souped-up, multi-tasking, cross between DOS and a Commodore 64. It has a C64-like shell with a dialect of C/C++ instead of BASIC. It was written from scratch, and not even ASCII was sacred -- it has 8-bit unsigned character source code to support European languages. Also, the source code has graphics.
> I should have put the effort in first and should have only allowed myself to gain confidence through the results that followed.
This is a very powerful ending. I've struggled a lot to change parts of me in the past, but this is my big fight. I, like everyone else, care too much about other's opinion. I base almost my whole confidence on other's people opinion. Others rise me up or take me down. And I've tried to change that to something else. I've tried the "I don't give a fuck", I've tried to be mean... But I think trying to get confident through work is the best way.
If the OP wrote the pastebin content and is reading this, don't be so hard on yourself. The self-awareness on display here alone is a sign of high ability, and it's something many people lack. I go to a top-10 school and it's clear to me that intelligence ≠ grades in a lot of cases.
Also, you can't be "a fool" for believing in yourself. Confidence, false or earned, is incredibly useful in motivating yourself to push limits and achieve great things. I have found that as long as I tell myself my goals are achievable and do my work in that mindset, I can do many things I thought were out of my reach. It sounds like "The Secret"-esque bullshit, but it can help.
There is no reason to push yourself to the point of "breaking
as you describe. When you get there, take a step back and think about why you're at school and why you're chasing x or y career goal. The point of work is to purchase leisure, but if you're letting work consume everything then you'll have a hard time being happy. I think many people forget that work is, in many cases, a means to an end. Slow down until you're at a point where you can enjoy your time, and don't worry about the pace of everyone around you. Again this might sound like cliché nonsense but I take a lot of comfort in thinking about the big picture when pressure builds.
If you weren't looking for advice, forget everything I said. Also I congratulate you for "letting it all out", it's not easy to compose one's thoughts into such a rational assessment of a bad situation.
I too went to a top 5 school and took some of the hardest classes in a school which is famous for its hard classes. And yes, it becomes pretty obvious quickly that grades are not a reflection of intelligence. And when the threshold intelligence is high in the sample size, say at a good school, grades and intelligence may be very weakly correlated, if at all.
Personally, I do have the ability to be extremely focused for long hours. But I don't think that having that ability counts for a lot in real world. My cofounder is borderline ADHD and there are things he can accomplish that I just cannot.
> Personally, I do have the ability to be extremely focused for long hours. But I don't think that having that ability counts for a lot in real world.
As a person who recently discovered that he doesn't have this ability and can't focus for more than 10 minutes unless it's a hobby project or one is in a really good mood, I can tell you that this ability does count a lot.
Happily, you can train the ability to hold your attention on whatever you desire, just like you might train your biceps to be stronger.
If you're interested, look into "mindfulness meditation". If you're immediately repelled (as I was) by the idea, know that there are several serious engineers who now swear by this technique. There is a guy at Google who teaches mindfulness meditation in a series of classes to other Googlers, and he can't keep up with demand. Look at siyli.org for some introductory videos (especially the ones showing a physiological effects of having done N hours of meditation).
Thanks for your advice and reassuring references. I actually stumbled upon mindfulness meditation several times on HN, and after first being repelled, I ended up up reading "Mindfulness In Plain English" recently, and now I'm about to start practicing it.
Basically, I got fed up with this state and decided to solve it once and for all. I've managed to make some progress on it and I feel better/more productive at work now, so I have high hopes it'll get even better. Mindfulness is what I'm trying now, and the next book to read is "Feeling Good" (similarly, heavily recommended on HN), a basic Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy book.
While I agree that this ability may help in certain kinds of development/ coding work, I do think they are various cognitive niches that different people can occupy well.
For instance, I think people with functioning ADHD do pretty well as dealmakers, traders and maybe even certain kind of managers. I suffer from a mild form of bipolar, and it allows me to be very creative & productive in my manic phases, but I cannot always be as consistent as an ops person.
There are two kinds of false confidence: the kind you believe to be true and the kind you don't. Both can cause trouble when you can't deliver, but when false confidence is expressed in good faith it's hard to really lay too much blame on the person in the short term; it was simply a mistake. If failure acts as a "market correction" and the person amends their behavior in such a way that they improve (always in many small increments, never in one swift move of grandeur) and subsequently gains a new high confidence that's backed by something real, the failure was a good and worthwhile one.
I get what you're saying and why it has to be said, but I want to add that I think it's reasonable to work for reasons other than buying leisure.
In particular, I believe that it's important for me to be useful to society, and I also consider my work to be personal, like an art. As a result, my happiness is tied to how well I think I'm working. I don't think that's crazy.
One thing I've learned to love is being average. I'm not some rockstar ninja coder. Nor do I want to be. Average is fine. Do you know what average people accomplish? A lot! Average people build cars, houses, farm food, they even manage to program these magical things called computers. Not everybody is a genius, or even bright. Nor everybody needs to be one. You can do amazing things without having been an straight A student. How do I know? I graduated with a GPA of 2.16. Yep. 2.16. Guess what? I am a programmer who enjoys his work, make a very, very good living, and have managed to build a coupe of profitable businesses. All while being an average guy.
I used to think that being smart was the thing to be. Not anymore. What you need to be is resilient. While a smart person pauses to analyze, I keep trying and trying until I get it. No pause needed.
Go on. Live your life. Love the gifts you have and put them to good use. Don't measure yourself by how you compare to others. But how you compare to your own past. Keep moving. Be resilient.
OP should stop comparing himself to others and know that good grades isn't the meaning of life, just appreciate what you already have. I also got a low score in Theory of Computation, but the subject itself is actually extremely hard. Also me and my friends study harder than most of our other classmates but we still never get decent grades
I was probably fortunate that this kind of frustration came much earlier in my life. In elementary school, I basically never studied for any exams other than memorization-style spelling and vocab tests. I excelled at math but was mediocre at best at everything else. I distinctly remember getting a 17/100 on a 5th grade, take home, open book history test. (actually, the only reason I was good at math was because I went to my normal "American" school 5 days a week and a separate "Japanese expat" school on Saturdays and had double the math hours as all my peers)
I also remember when things changed for me, and had OP's "I can do better" moment. It was in 7th grade when I got my first B in math in my life (Algebra) and narrowly escaped a C in Civics (I think I got a 79.6). While not "disastrous" marks by any means, it was still incredibly jarring for a generally studious kid who always turned in his homework on time, wrote his papers, tried hard, etc.
Looking back, it's strange that the almost-C bothered me, since I think I had some Cs during elementary school. Maybe I had instinctively known that in Junior High, the stakes were somehow higher. But more importantly, my new friends were getting straight A's, and I knew that there was no reason I couldn't do just as well as them. Also, I knew that I was "good at math" and that I should of course be able to get an A in the subject. Of course, I had basically never studied in my life, so it was growing pains figuring out how I can do well in history/literature/spanish exams.
I somehow managed to figure out a studying method that worked for me and it was good enough to get me near straight A's throughout the rest of Junior High. My High School was the same as my JH, so knowing "the system", I was able to do similarly well in HS. The biggest difference that I can see between OP and myself is that my "on" switch was flipped 6-7 years before OP's, which allowed me to turn on the after burners while I still wasn't too far behind my peers and still had enough time to catch up.
However, I was definitely not the most efficient or the smartest in my class, and was probably putting in the most time out of anyone in my grade. Two guys were definitely much much smarter than me and I knew it, despite my having higher grades than either of them. To this day they are two of my closest friends.
Looking at the "traits" OP describes in the studious types is really interesting to me. I procrastinated like crazy and played video games for an obscene number of hours (I would frequently borrow a RPG + the console from a friend on friday, finish the ~25 hour game over the weekend and return it to him on monday). I remember playing FF7 before it was even out in the states (since all my consoles were Japanese region) for over 300 hours and had amassed so much "gil" (money) in the game that the number was overflowing out the left side of the menu window. But it's true that I have always performed well under pressure (I always did better on the actual standardized exams than my practice exams) and put in pointlessly long hours studying the course material until I knew (almost) everything (combined with the massive hours of video gaming and extracurricular activities I had, I would often only get 3 hours of sleep/night which is just pure idiocy).
But what do I have to show at the end of it all? Honestly the result is a book smart'ish and tool'ish person who can't build anything to save his life anymore, a far cry from the kid who would tinker around and build stuff when he was 8~10 years old. I do extremely well within the defined framework of an academic setting, but I highly doubt that I'd outperform this significantly doing anything "in the real world" (I probably do outperform the "average" to some extent, but definitely not to the degree I did as a student). Hindsight is 20/20, but it would have served me much better to have focused on what I enjoyed most: drawing, tinkering around with techy stuff, etc rather than devote thousands of hours to cramming academic material int...
Seventh grade was an awakening for me, too. I had sailed through elementary school with no effort, then hit seventh grade an nearly failed multiple classes my first quarter. That changed things significantly.
Unfortunately, it didn't change things enough. My senior year of high school, I was taking three AP classes and still only doing maybe an hour or so of homework a day and still getting good grades.
Then I hit college. And that hour a day completely didn't cut it (and getting hooked on MUDs didn't help :). I didn't get the grades I wanted, but I got the grades I deserved (maybe even better), graduated, and never cared about them again.
Far more important than the ability to get perfect grades is the ability to learn on one's own. And I don't think the two are perfectly correlated in any way.
"Far more important than the ability to get perfect grades is the ability to learn on one's own. And I don't think the two are perfectly correlated in any way."
I agree entirely. In fact, I've always been of the opinion that the institutionalization of learning works to the detriment of education and discourages most students from learning on their own, while doing an incompetent job of equipping them with knowledge of value. Schools ought to place greater emphasis on technical skills, applied math, nonfiction writing and modern government/geopolitics; and less on lab science, academic math, literature and classical history. It's not that the classical academic subjects lack intelectual value, but that public schools ought to serve a purely pragmatic purpose. The current system is, in my opinion, exceedingly ineffective and even detrimental to students who are deterred by what they perceive as pedantic material. They determine that they don't like school (particularly math), adopt defeatist attitudes and, by the end of high school, are entirely unequipped to enter the workforce or to matriculate into post-secondary programs.
Also, I'm curious as to when you attended school and which APs you took. I'm currently taking four, and I consider myself fortunate on nights when I have less than four hours of work.
OP: I remember being in precisely your position when my last year's exams came around many years ago. I remember going from effortlessly succeeding in school to busting my ass to be mediocre in uni, too.
The fact is that over the long run, effort counts for more than exam performance, so if you are trying, keep doing it. That's what counts. ADD/ADHD-type inability to concentrate and focus are hard, but you do learn to cope, and more importantly you learn to position yourself in situations where you exploit its advantages.
What I wouldn't do is not push yourself when you believe you can get away with it, a mistake you and I both have made. Keep yourself on the boundary of uncomfortable, otherwise you will not be prepared when it gets tough.
Keep it up for a few more weeks and it'll be done, and just keep getting up.
There is so very correlation between grades and creativity[1], which I consider to be far more important than raw intelligence (as measured by an IQ test).
The problem with the OP is not that he got so worried about grades, it's that he/she let is obsession with grades impact his relationships with others. He saw them as a zero-sum game, and that's not the way life is (generally) played. Even within university, where grades may be distributed in a zero-sum fashion, the entire experience is most assuredly not zero-sum.
More importantly than all of that, though, is the OP gained a large level of self-awareness. That self-awareness (as long as he doesn't let him completely cripple his confidence) will be far more valuable than full marks here and there.
By your post, you clearly show a will to amend your past actions, and to work seriously now, to get grades you deserve - not just because you're "good at anything you touch", but because you are good and apply effort.
Trust me on this one, these deserved success will taste like ambrosia.
At the moment, do not overtly blame yourself. Many people can't see through themselves like you did. Yet since we're all human, we all fail time to time.
The real danger, as you so clearly phrased, is self delusion, ie refusing to see or understand how or why we fail.
The TV philosopher of my childhood said it best - "knowing is half the battle" (†)
†: Gi Joe, famous tv philosopher, giving quotes and wisdom to children, worldwide :-)
Snort: you'll notice that little course called "nonlinear control systems" with the A after it? That's as far as you can go in math. Nonlinear differential equations. Ask any mathmetician. He'll tell you nonlinear differential equations is the end of the road.
Good thing here: facing the feedback and updating.
Not so good: taking the narrow criteria of school grading as a crucial measure of worth. High or low, it may matter, but not so intensely as this writer seems to feel it.
The words would be something along the lines of "good grades are indicative of discipline and work ethic moreso than intellectual capacity" and that many people that we consider extremely intelligent or gifted had really poor grades.
Sometimes, its just a case of being in the wrong field of study.
I was a straight A student out of high school, with little effort to boot. Then I picked a major that I didn't really care for, because I didn't know any better ...
I breezed through the first few years of college taking general classes and the introductory classes to my major, but even then the cracks were beginning to show in my choice of major, I'd score B's where I thought I'd get A's and ever so often I'd come really close to getting C's.
When I hit the senior level courses, those B's turned to C's and ever so often I'd almost get a D.
Why the decline in performance? Nothing had changed, except what I was studying. I didn't care for it, and it didn't play to any of my academic strengths (lots of math which I simply don't have the patience for), so I couldn't just cruise through them.
When I graduated college, I had a very decent general GPA (in the low 3's), but it was only so because of my strong early performance in college, my major GPA was in the 2's. I was so ashamed that I didn't attend my own graduation and wouldn't let my family come either. I withdrew a little bit from friends and life, because I felt I had let down a lot of people and was a bit of a failure.
3 years later I discovered something I truly loved (programming and building things) and after many years of excelling at it ... I finally realized what I'd done wrong.
Hopefully you come to this realization much earlier than I did.
In college, whenever I bragged about doing something interesting or achieving some milestone in my studies, my roomie Paul would draw hard on his big doobie (they hardly got you stoned back then even if you smoked all night) and say something like "Miller, I could do that if I just gave a shit. I'd kick your ass and everyone's ass, if I could just get off my ass".
Not sure whatever happened to Paul.
OP: find out what you are good at. Grades and academia are not the be-all and end-all of existence or success.
I don't mean to be a dick, but its called the 99TH percentile for a reason. Those guys getting top marks are smarter than 99 percent of the general population. I've often been a bit mystified by peoples inability to recognize where they sit on the intellectual bell curve.
I have some similar issues, though I still breezed through college (prestigious school in 3.5 years, deans list, didn't "study"). I probably related that story here (and definitely did on reddit in one of those kids-called-gifted-where-are-you-now thread), so I'll spare us that story again.
But where this really hit me was just two years after college, trying to write a large technical book (on HTML). I'm just now completing the task after 9 long months.
It seemed like my mind broke, not because it was hard, but because of some other invisible wall. I still don't have the words for it. Writing about other things and reading other writing seemed to be the only thing that helped. It was easy to write about the topics of my expertise, but so much of the book was material that I had only heard of, and had to immerse myself in completely before I could even begin the task of writing. The project was therefore a set of many tasks within tasks.
OP writes:
> Regardless of whether or not they like or dislike the material, they break the challenge of studying for a test or completing an assignment into small problems, working away until they know, not think, but absolutely know that they are ready.
There are four or five poems I read almost every day as a sort of cathartic ritual, and one of them is The Ladder of St. Augustine, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (of Paul Revere fame). The snippet that runs through my mind constantly:
We have not wings, we cannot soar;
But we have feet to scale and climb
By slow degrees, by more and more,
The cloudy summits of our time.
The mighty pyramids of stone
That wedge-like cleave the desert airs,
When nearer seen, and better known,
Are but gigantic flights of stairs.
The distant mountains, that uprear
Their solid bastions to the skies,
Are crossed by pathways, that appear
As we to higher levels rise.
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
Some days its hard to open a text editor. I don't know why. But sometimes looking down at the stepping stones is more useful for moving forward than looking up at your goals or (sometimes worse) everyone else. I think of poetry and start the program.
> There are four or five poems I read almost every day as a sort of cathartic ritual, and one of them is The Ladder of St. Augustine, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (of Paul Revere fame).
Out of curiosity, if it isn't too personal, which are the other ones?
One random by Du Fu, I have a book on my desk with several bookmarked. They are hard to understand without knowing the time period (he lived through one of the largest losses of life on the planet), but here's one that's fairly neutral: nothttps://gist.github.com/simonsarris/5472121
Mad River, also by HW Longellow (I live on this river)
And one from a collection of poems by an "amateur", the poet most dear to me, and one of the few people who has encouraged me to write: http://everything2.com/user/etouffee/writeups
There are four or five poems I read almost every day as a sort of cathartic ritual
Wonderful! I'd love to hear about them. I also have a few go-to poems for those days I feel unbalanced. The two I've probably digested the most would be "If--" by Rudyard Kipling, and "Desiderata" by Max Ehrmann. They're not exactly hidden gems, and I've even seen them floated around HN from time to time, but man do they work.
While you give good advice, I'm going to call you out on the humblebrag here. I imagine that OP might feel kind of bad to hear about the troubles of a deans list student who had trouble becoming a published technical author.
The point I should have made instead of comparing it to myself is that I don't think its collegiate difficulty per se that is problematic for a lot of people. Instead I think the problem is large (seemingly too large) tasks, and people like the OP and myself never learned how to deal with them until far too late.
Had I gone to a college that assigned larger homework I don't think I would have done nearly as well, so my chance to attempt a non-trivial sized project until I was out of school.
It honestly sounds like you do not have similar issues at all.
Everybody has an experience or story about where they hit a wall with something in their life. This post was specifically about hitting a wall in college.
Writing a book is quite a different task from taking college classes. It's also not something where you can easily compare yourself against others, which was a huge component of this post.
There's a similar passage from Pope's "An Essay on Criticism that I'm particularly fond of and I think illustrates the kind of hubris the OP was suffering from:
A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fir'd at first Sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless Youth we tempt the Heights of Arts,
While from the bounded Level of our Mind,
Short Views we take, nor see the lengths behind,
But more advanc'd, behold with strange Surprize
New, distant Scenes of endless Science rise!
So pleas'd at first, the towring Alps we try,
Mount o'er the Vales, and seem to tread the Sky;
Th' Eternal Snows appear already past,
And the first Clouds and Mountains seem the last:
But those attain'd, we tremble to survey
The growing Labours of the lengthen'd Way,
Th' increasing Prospect tires our wandering Eyes,
Hills peep o'er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise!
Also, "Before the gates of excellence, the high gods have placed sweat" -Hesiod
I've had similar issues as the OP, though at university I accepted lower marks than I could have gotten because I simply didn't want to go to class. I could learn the material on my own and use the time-savings to learn other things I was interested in. I almost always made top marks on exams, so it wasn't an issue (unless attendance was mandatory...)
I met a few people that had screwed off in High School, but for some reason had decided to take College extraordinarily seriously. I realized that for other people, material that would take me an hour or two to learn would take a solid 8 locked in the library.
As it turns out, after talking to some of these people, the problem wasn't that they weren't smart. It's that they didn't know how to learn, or had some misconceptions about what learning entailed. I've watched people slog through upper-level math classes by trying to memorize the relevant material, when they could have understood it in half the time, if they'd approached the material with the right mindset.
For a while, I was the OP. At least until I realized that if your goal is to beat your peers, or measure up to some arbitrary external standard, you probably won't. Even if you succeed, you'll make yourself miserable trying. On the other hand, if your goal is to learn, you'll do it. You might even stand a chance of beating out your peers. Unfortunately, something a lot of people don't understand about learning is that after a certain amount of effort, it just takes the amount of time it's gonna take. You can't really sit down and say "I'm going to learn x in y hours" and not be disappointed much of the time. Sadly, the education system all the way through College makes it seem like this is so.
It totally is about the mindset. And it's a combination of being properly motivated(intrinsic interest), and also seeing different ways in which to navigate the subject, and also knowing which ones are suited to your abilities at that moment.
With all of those traits, it's easy. If you miss one, you might be able to slog through. And if you miss two, it will be extremely difficult.
And our educational systems really don't encourage anything but memorization, despite ample PR otherwise, so there's a selection bias by the time you hit college level courses.
"...though I still breezed through college (prestigious school in 3.5 years, deans list, didn't "study"). I probably related that story here (and definitely did on reddit in one of those kids-called-gifted-where-are-you-now thread), so I'll spare us that story again."
Sorry but reading this makes me want to wretch -- the Bard character from Asterix comes to mind ;-)
>The original outside of pyramid consisted of smooth, white limestone that hid the layers of brick, giving the effect that a pyramid was one giant solid piece.
As I went through college (and I think everyone more or less goes through this) I learned to care less about marks as a whole and more about what I learned in that class/if there the knowledge is easily obtainable elsewhere. However, I'm fortunate enough to be in a field that doesn't explicitly require grad school (compared to say, those aspiring to be doctors) and that internship experience/generally more concrete interviews generally lessen the requirement for having really high marks.
120 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadSometimes it's great reading how other people feel in these kinds of private situations that happen inside one's conscious.
You can't really discuss them with anyone else so when one person decides to let it all out (as OP did), I think its beneficial to EVERYONE who may have had or still have these kinds feelings/experiences.
The point of education is to set aside the hubris and learn.
You very clearly have.
- Kanye West
http://rapgenius.com/Kanye-west-school-spirit-skit-1-2-lyric...
I'm just like OP. Recently I gave exams and if I hadn't had my friend over for studies then I would have failed. Now I'm getting a decent score.
I have learned something today, "To lose false confidence in me". You have opened my eyes.
I was fiddling with scripts and browsing all day long just before my physics exam. Can you believe it?
All the best ;)
New flash, guess who this is?
take_the_day_off creep negligence pleasure startled Angola Far kings cowardice seldomness virgins referred candle Cross mail over-anxiously rightful waters prelate sounds vain grievous Guadeloupe law tend contradict gall slumber woman's sess_me
----
Go find God, then come back. You know nothing. Less than nothing.
----
Hey shrink? I get respect.
http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=56
http://www.templeos.org/images/Machine.jpg
-----
[–]the8thbit 1 point 21 minutes ago
Fun fact, this guy made his own operating system. No, not Linux distribution. Not UNIX clone. Operating system. With windowing. In his own words:
TempleOS is 64-bit, flat, non-segmented and multi-cored. It's like a modern, souped-up, multi-tasking, cross between DOS and a Commodore 64. It has a C64-like shell with a dialect of C/C++ instead of BASIC. It was written from scratch, and not even ASCII was sacred -- it has 8-bit unsigned character source code to support European languages. Also, the source code has graphics.
This is a very powerful ending. I've struggled a lot to change parts of me in the past, but this is my big fight. I, like everyone else, care too much about other's opinion. I base almost my whole confidence on other's people opinion. Others rise me up or take me down. And I've tried to change that to something else. I've tried the "I don't give a fuck", I've tried to be mean... But I think trying to get confident through work is the best way.
Also, you can't be "a fool" for believing in yourself. Confidence, false or earned, is incredibly useful in motivating yourself to push limits and achieve great things. I have found that as long as I tell myself my goals are achievable and do my work in that mindset, I can do many things I thought were out of my reach. It sounds like "The Secret"-esque bullshit, but it can help.
There is no reason to push yourself to the point of "breaking as you describe. When you get there, take a step back and think about why you're at school and why you're chasing x or y career goal. The point of work is to purchase leisure, but if you're letting work consume everything then you'll have a hard time being happy. I think many people forget that work is, in many cases, a means to an end. Slow down until you're at a point where you can enjoy your time, and don't worry about the pace of everyone around you. Again this might sound like cliché nonsense but I take a lot of comfort in thinking about the big picture when pressure builds.
If you weren't looking for advice, forget everything I said. Also I congratulate you for "letting it all out", it's not easy to compose one's thoughts into such a rational assessment of a bad situation.
Personally, I do have the ability to be extremely focused for long hours. But I don't think that having that ability counts for a lot in real world. My cofounder is borderline ADHD and there are things he can accomplish that I just cannot.
As a person who recently discovered that he doesn't have this ability and can't focus for more than 10 minutes unless it's a hobby project or one is in a really good mood, I can tell you that this ability does count a lot.
If you're interested, look into "mindfulness meditation". If you're immediately repelled (as I was) by the idea, know that there are several serious engineers who now swear by this technique. There is a guy at Google who teaches mindfulness meditation in a series of classes to other Googlers, and he can't keep up with demand. Look at siyli.org for some introductory videos (especially the ones showing a physiological effects of having done N hours of meditation).
Basically, I got fed up with this state and decided to solve it once and for all. I've managed to make some progress on it and I feel better/more productive at work now, so I have high hopes it'll get even better. Mindfulness is what I'm trying now, and the next book to read is "Feeling Good" (similarly, heavily recommended on HN), a basic Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy book.
For instance, I think people with functioning ADHD do pretty well as dealmakers, traders and maybe even certain kind of managers. I suffer from a mild form of bipolar, and it allows me to be very creative & productive in my manic phases, but I cannot always be as consistent as an ops person.
There are two kinds of false confidence: the kind you believe to be true and the kind you don't. Both can cause trouble when you can't deliver, but when false confidence is expressed in good faith it's hard to really lay too much blame on the person in the short term; it was simply a mistake. If failure acts as a "market correction" and the person amends their behavior in such a way that they improve (always in many small increments, never in one swift move of grandeur) and subsequently gains a new high confidence that's backed by something real, the failure was a good and worthwhile one.
In particular, I believe that it's important for me to be useful to society, and I also consider my work to be personal, like an art. As a result, my happiness is tied to how well I think I'm working. I don't think that's crazy.
I used to think that being smart was the thing to be. Not anymore. What you need to be is resilient. While a smart person pauses to analyze, I keep trying and trying until I get it. No pause needed.
Go on. Live your life. Love the gifts you have and put them to good use. Don't measure yourself by how you compare to others. But how you compare to your own past. Keep moving. Be resilient.
I also remember when things changed for me, and had OP's "I can do better" moment. It was in 7th grade when I got my first B in math in my life (Algebra) and narrowly escaped a C in Civics (I think I got a 79.6). While not "disastrous" marks by any means, it was still incredibly jarring for a generally studious kid who always turned in his homework on time, wrote his papers, tried hard, etc.
Looking back, it's strange that the almost-C bothered me, since I think I had some Cs during elementary school. Maybe I had instinctively known that in Junior High, the stakes were somehow higher. But more importantly, my new friends were getting straight A's, and I knew that there was no reason I couldn't do just as well as them. Also, I knew that I was "good at math" and that I should of course be able to get an A in the subject. Of course, I had basically never studied in my life, so it was growing pains figuring out how I can do well in history/literature/spanish exams.
I somehow managed to figure out a studying method that worked for me and it was good enough to get me near straight A's throughout the rest of Junior High. My High School was the same as my JH, so knowing "the system", I was able to do similarly well in HS. The biggest difference that I can see between OP and myself is that my "on" switch was flipped 6-7 years before OP's, which allowed me to turn on the after burners while I still wasn't too far behind my peers and still had enough time to catch up.
However, I was definitely not the most efficient or the smartest in my class, and was probably putting in the most time out of anyone in my grade. Two guys were definitely much much smarter than me and I knew it, despite my having higher grades than either of them. To this day they are two of my closest friends.
Looking at the "traits" OP describes in the studious types is really interesting to me. I procrastinated like crazy and played video games for an obscene number of hours (I would frequently borrow a RPG + the console from a friend on friday, finish the ~25 hour game over the weekend and return it to him on monday). I remember playing FF7 before it was even out in the states (since all my consoles were Japanese region) for over 300 hours and had amassed so much "gil" (money) in the game that the number was overflowing out the left side of the menu window. But it's true that I have always performed well under pressure (I always did better on the actual standardized exams than my practice exams) and put in pointlessly long hours studying the course material until I knew (almost) everything (combined with the massive hours of video gaming and extracurricular activities I had, I would often only get 3 hours of sleep/night which is just pure idiocy).
But what do I have to show at the end of it all? Honestly the result is a book smart'ish and tool'ish person who can't build anything to save his life anymore, a far cry from the kid who would tinker around and build stuff when he was 8~10 years old. I do extremely well within the defined framework of an academic setting, but I highly doubt that I'd outperform this significantly doing anything "in the real world" (I probably do outperform the "average" to some extent, but definitely not to the degree I did as a student). Hindsight is 20/20, but it would have served me much better to have focused on what I enjoyed most: drawing, tinkering around with techy stuff, etc rather than devote thousands of hours to cramming academic material int...
Unfortunately, it didn't change things enough. My senior year of high school, I was taking three AP classes and still only doing maybe an hour or so of homework a day and still getting good grades.
Then I hit college. And that hour a day completely didn't cut it (and getting hooked on MUDs didn't help :). I didn't get the grades I wanted, but I got the grades I deserved (maybe even better), graduated, and never cared about them again.
Far more important than the ability to get perfect grades is the ability to learn on one's own. And I don't think the two are perfectly correlated in any way.
Bingo!
Also, I'm curious as to when you attended school and which APs you took. I'm currently taking four, and I consider myself fortunate on nights when I have less than four hours of work.
The fact is that over the long run, effort counts for more than exam performance, so if you are trying, keep doing it. That's what counts. ADD/ADHD-type inability to concentrate and focus are hard, but you do learn to cope, and more importantly you learn to position yourself in situations where you exploit its advantages.
What I wouldn't do is not push yourself when you believe you can get away with it, a mistake you and I both have made. Keep yourself on the boundary of uncomfortable, otherwise you will not be prepared when it gets tough.
Keep it up for a few more weeks and it'll be done, and just keep getting up.
The problem with the OP is not that he got so worried about grades, it's that he/she let is obsession with grades impact his relationships with others. He saw them as a zero-sum game, and that's not the way life is (generally) played. Even within university, where grades may be distributed in a zero-sum fashion, the entire experience is most assuredly not zero-sum.
More importantly than all of that, though, is the OP gained a large level of self-awareness. That self-awareness (as long as he doesn't let him completely cripple his confidence) will be far more valuable than full marks here and there.
1. http://www.jofamericanscience.org/journals/am-sci/0505/13_09...
By your post, you clearly show a will to amend your past actions, and to work seriously now, to get grades you deserve - not just because you're "good at anything you touch", but because you are good and apply effort.
Trust me on this one, these deserved success will taste like ambrosia.
At the moment, do not overtly blame yourself. Many people can't see through themselves like you did. Yet since we're all human, we all fail time to time.
The real danger, as you so clearly phrased, is self delusion, ie refusing to see or understand how or why we fail.
The TV philosopher of my childhood said it best - "knowing is half the battle" (†)
†: Gi Joe, famous tv philosopher, giving quotes and wisdom to children, worldwide :-)
X_dot = A X + B U
Y = C X + D U
Rocket science
I did simstructure -- rocketscience
My master's degree is rocket science
http://www.templeos.org/files/ASU_Transcripts.pdf
Snort: you'll notice that little course called "nonlinear control systems" with the A after it? That's as far as you can go in math. Nonlinear differential equations. Ask any mathmetician. He'll tell you nonlinear differential equations is the end of the road.
Not so good: taking the narrow criteria of school grading as a crucial measure of worth. High or low, it may matter, but not so intensely as this writer seems to feel it.
The words would be something along the lines of "good grades are indicative of discipline and work ethic moreso than intellectual capacity" and that many people that we consider extremely intelligent or gifted had really poor grades.
I was a straight A student out of high school, with little effort to boot. Then I picked a major that I didn't really care for, because I didn't know any better ...
I breezed through the first few years of college taking general classes and the introductory classes to my major, but even then the cracks were beginning to show in my choice of major, I'd score B's where I thought I'd get A's and ever so often I'd come really close to getting C's.
When I hit the senior level courses, those B's turned to C's and ever so often I'd almost get a D.
Why the decline in performance? Nothing had changed, except what I was studying. I didn't care for it, and it didn't play to any of my academic strengths (lots of math which I simply don't have the patience for), so I couldn't just cruise through them.
When I graduated college, I had a very decent general GPA (in the low 3's), but it was only so because of my strong early performance in college, my major GPA was in the 2's. I was so ashamed that I didn't attend my own graduation and wouldn't let my family come either. I withdrew a little bit from friends and life, because I felt I had let down a lot of people and was a bit of a failure.
3 years later I discovered something I truly loved (programming and building things) and after many years of excelling at it ... I finally realized what I'd done wrong.
Hopefully you come to this realization much earlier than I did.
Not sure whatever happened to Paul.
OP: find out what you are good at. Grades and academia are not the be-all and end-all of existence or success.
But where this really hit me was just two years after college, trying to write a large technical book (on HTML). I'm just now completing the task after 9 long months.
It seemed like my mind broke, not because it was hard, but because of some other invisible wall. I still don't have the words for it. Writing about other things and reading other writing seemed to be the only thing that helped. It was easy to write about the topics of my expertise, but so much of the book was material that I had only heard of, and had to immerse myself in completely before I could even begin the task of writing. The project was therefore a set of many tasks within tasks.
OP writes:
> Regardless of whether or not they like or dislike the material, they break the challenge of studying for a test or completing an assignment into small problems, working away until they know, not think, but absolutely know that they are ready.
There are four or five poems I read almost every day as a sort of cathartic ritual, and one of them is The Ladder of St. Augustine, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (of Paul Revere fame). The snippet that runs through my mind constantly:
Some days its hard to open a text editor. I don't know why. But sometimes looking down at the stepping stones is more useful for moving forward than looking up at your goals or (sometimes worse) everyone else. I think of poetry and start the program.[1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Ladder_of_St._Augustine
Out of curiosity, if it isn't too personal, which are the other ones?
Mad River, also by HW Longellow (I live on this river)
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Mad_River
St. Augustine, which was above
And one from a collection of poems by an "amateur", the poet most dear to me, and one of the few people who has encouraged me to write: http://everything2.com/user/etouffee/writeups
Wonderful! I'd love to hear about them. I also have a few go-to poems for those days I feel unbalanced. The two I've probably digested the most would be "If--" by Rudyard Kipling, and "Desiderata" by Max Ehrmann. They're not exactly hidden gems, and I've even seen them floated around HN from time to time, but man do they work.
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~gongsu/desiderata_textonly.html
http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm
The point I should have made instead of comparing it to myself is that I don't think its collegiate difficulty per se that is problematic for a lot of people. Instead I think the problem is large (seemingly too large) tasks, and people like the OP and myself never learned how to deal with them until far too late.
Had I gone to a college that assigned larger homework I don't think I would have done nearly as well, so my chance to attempt a non-trivial sized project until I was out of school.
It honestly sounds like you do not have similar issues at all.
Everybody has an experience or story about where they hit a wall with something in their life. This post was specifically about hitting a wall in college.
Writing a book is quite a different task from taking college classes. It's also not something where you can easily compare yourself against others, which was a huge component of this post.
I've had similar issues as the OP, though at university I accepted lower marks than I could have gotten because I simply didn't want to go to class. I could learn the material on my own and use the time-savings to learn other things I was interested in. I almost always made top marks on exams, so it wasn't an issue (unless attendance was mandatory...)
I met a few people that had screwed off in High School, but for some reason had decided to take College extraordinarily seriously. I realized that for other people, material that would take me an hour or two to learn would take a solid 8 locked in the library.
As it turns out, after talking to some of these people, the problem wasn't that they weren't smart. It's that they didn't know how to learn, or had some misconceptions about what learning entailed. I've watched people slog through upper-level math classes by trying to memorize the relevant material, when they could have understood it in half the time, if they'd approached the material with the right mindset.
For a while, I was the OP. At least until I realized that if your goal is to beat your peers, or measure up to some arbitrary external standard, you probably won't. Even if you succeed, you'll make yourself miserable trying. On the other hand, if your goal is to learn, you'll do it. You might even stand a chance of beating out your peers. Unfortunately, something a lot of people don't understand about learning is that after a certain amount of effort, it just takes the amount of time it's gonna take. You can't really sit down and say "I'm going to learn x in y hours" and not be disappointed much of the time. Sadly, the education system all the way through College makes it seem like this is so.
With all of those traits, it's easy. If you miss one, you might be able to slog through. And if you miss two, it will be extremely difficult.
And our educational systems really don't encourage anything but memorization, despite ample PR otherwise, so there's a selection bias by the time you hit college level courses.
Sorry but reading this makes me want to wretch -- the Bard character from Asterix comes to mind ;-)
>The original outside of pyramid consisted of smooth, white limestone that hid the layers of brick, giving the effect that a pyramid was one giant solid piece.