Obsession

There is a certain anxiety that comes when you know you have to do something you really don't want to do. For example, a class holds no interest, you know what needs to be done but you have no inclination to do it, so you don't. Besides you can always do it later and later sounds great. The deadline draws near and you must complete tasks (final projects, prepare for the exam, etc) or risk taking the class over again. You know you need to perform but you just can't bring yourself to do it. The anxiety of missing the deadline sets in and the thought of doing something over again that you detested doing in the first place begins to eat away at you. The tasks really aren't all that difficult or time-consuming. The real barrier to success is just you and your own stubborn will. Now there's anguish from the self-inflicted pain. Then you get depressed because you realize that you did this to yourself.

What I read in your story is that you are attributing the success of others and your failure to intrinsic qualities in them and yourself. This is a bad mindset; from this point of view at best your successes are realizations of a predetermined destiny, and at worst every failure is a personal reflection on you. In this worldview, it is emotionally safer to not try at all, and to pin your failures on a lack of interest or lack of effort. In the long run this is an incredibly destructive way to think, as you never accumulate the experience necessary to ultimately succeed.

You wrote:

"The students who obtain top grades in classes have an ability to focus like no other... It was an insult for me to think that I was ever anything like them"

It is possible that some rare people possess this ability from birth. Most of us have had to learn it. There is a way to gain this skill, and that way is by trying, failing, then trying again.

By your own account, you have not been trying until very recently. You should not expect to succeed on your first attempt or perform at the level of individuals that have been working at it for years. The good news is that your failure is not a reflection of anything intrinsic to your being, it is a reflection on the way people learn good study skills and work habits.

It sounds like you are arriving at this conclusion on your own, and I strongly encourage you to adopt a learning mindset where intelligence and achievement are things gained through practice and gradual improvement rather than characteristics engrained from birth.

There are good studies on the value of this mindset from the field of developmental psychology. A quick scan of the literature turns up a few. I didn't look very hard here, but you may find them worth a quick scan and a starting point for further investigation:

http://academic.reed.edu/motivation/docs/DangerousMindsetsPu... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17328703 http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/23087453?uid=3739560&#...

Some of those are not available in their entirety on the public internet, though it sounds like you're at university and may have access to them through the campus network.

My closing advice is to stay focused on incremental achievement and do your best to learn from your failures. You are starting at a disadvantage, but you can close the gap with time and effort.

I stumbled upon this once long ago and have not been able to (re)discover the source since. In my memory, it was attributed to Leo Tolstoy (or may have been a comment made by one character in reference to another in one of Tolstoy's novels). Or maybe I made the whole thing up and was simply chastising myself while trying to learn Russian by being clever instead of diligent.

It near perfectly distills so much.

I would prefer diligence over cleverness every single time, most especially within myself.

You may want to check out this movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2036416/

It is a story about Giddens Ko, who grew up despising Grade A students, then became somewhat of a Grade A student himself. He went on to become the most successful Chinese author / director.