Focus is the key to success in everything.
Obsession
41–50 of 121 posts
Re: Obsession
#42Focus is the key to success in everything.
Re: Obsession
#43A lot of people don't mention this, but being smart (and more importantly knowing that you're smart) at an early age can have a HUGE negative effect on your development.
This obviously doesn't happen always, but when you're a kid that knows you have some superior intellect, you make immature kid-like decisions because of it. You fall in love with your own head. You believe that you just "get it." You ignore opportunities to develop skills because you have this irrational (and often misplaced) confidence in you abilities.
This sounds like exactly what happened to the OP. They never truly developed ther ability to focus because they could always skate by. Then when they finally couldn't skate by anymore, BAM, they realize "oh shit, I'm nowhere near as good at this as I thought I was."
The good news is that once you have the awareness you can fix it, which is what it sounds like the OP started to do. Just don't focus so much on grades :)
Re: Obsession
#44If 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…
I'd like to add to this too:
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.
Re: Obsession
#45I'll throw my little story in here in case the OP is reading - always helps to have multiple points of view. I did alright in primary school[1] but mentally checked out in the first year of high school (year 7). I actually told my mum not to waste her breath chastising me for poor marks: I was more interested in friends and socialising so I wouldn't be doing much on the school front. She should expect Ds. not Fs nece…
That's what happens if you slack off in school. School (< age 18) is essentially the best place to learn how to learn, and many (including myself) defer this because they think its somehow too easy. School often seems so irrelevant, and lets not kid ourselves, much of it is. The one thing that isn't irrelevant however is learning how to learn. Glad you learnt it late, as did I..
Yeah I actually dropped out of Uni after 3 years but I'm so glad I went. People kind of say to me "oh aren't you upset you didn't finish?" but in actuality I finished like 13 courses, I just didn't do my thesis :)
But above all it just gave me the experience of figuring shit out. Totally invaluable.
Re: Obsession
#46If 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…
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 f…
> 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.
Re: Obsession
#47> I spend the day bedridden and panic-stricken by my own insecurities. To the author of the piece: you are depressed. You are shutting down all reasons to like yourself or even to have fun. I strongly advise counseling, immediately . Even though you're in the middle of exams, this is very important. Your school will have free or inexpensive resources available. I know you wrote your piece as a cautionary tale, but th…
I agree. Get help! It's not something to be ashamed of. Failure isn't something to be ashamed of. College isn't a race; maybe consider taking a year off and doing some exploring. Here's a quick Google for advice for taking a year off from college: http://ask.metafilter.com/25004/Taking-a-year-off-from-colle...
Otherwise, I can recommend to you a book that opened my eyes to the process of learning. The Art of Learning -- Josh Waitzkin.
Re: Obsession
#48If 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…
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.
Re: Obsession
#49I 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 co…
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.
Re: Obsession
#50Hmmm.. pastebin.com is not available from my geo location. I've had this couple of times before also.
Is there an alternative link to the original post?
The rest of the comments have been a good read anyway.
thanks.