How to become a good student (again) 1: Slow down to speed up
Hello, fellow ex-good-student!
If you’re anything like me, you feel this immense pressure on your shoulders, yes? You want to be good, you want to succed, you want to know more, but somehow -… somehow it just ain’t enough to actually get you to do something? Until the very last minute, that is, when all the pressure comes rushing down like a waterfall?
Ah, or perhaps that stress has driven you over the edge and you have achieved the next stage: being so stressed that you’re oddly calm again and nothing really fazes you anymore? Perhaps you have cynically accepted that this is just who you are now? Perhaps you say:
But somehow you fail to say it proudly. Somehow you’re just really unhappy with the state of things, but feel like you don’t give enough of a fuck to really change anything?
Yes? Well, then this is the post for you!
Let me start with three observations that are less obvious than you might think:
1) “Naturally” good students (NGS, so people, like you and me, who didn’t have to learn how to be good at school, but kinda slipped into it) are good thinkers.
2) Good thinkers like to think.
3) Good thinkers are trouble-shooters.
Got these three ideas lined up? Alright, let’s move on.
These two attitudes above, where do you think they come from? I’d argue it’s disillusionment.
See, when I got to uni, I thought it would be like school - just WAY better. That would mean professors who fit their programmes around me, personally, who help my mind become sharper by letting it battle against just the right problems and getting taught how to really get to the bottom of life, to face the really Big Ideas, the Final Problems, the Why is the universe the way it is?s.
Instead, it turns out, uni is like summer holidays - just WAY worse. No one fits anything to you, personally, no one picks out just the right problems, no one connects subjects in just the way you’d like it. You’re thrown into a maelstrom of ideas and it’s up to you to do whatever the hell you’d like with them. You’re on your own, but not in the hero vs. bad guy-way, but it in the loner in a crowd-way.
You quickly realize, uni is just a slightly filtered version of life in all its random glory and sadness. And I think that any student, anywhere, can have this epiphany at any given moment. You don’t need uni to suddenly look life in the eye and be overwhelmed by how sublime, how overwhelmingly huge it is and to realize: There’s no end goal (we know of). Just loads of open ends. An overwhelming amount of open ends, really.
Now, what do I mean when I say that NGS (”naturally” good students) are trouble-shooters? I mean that we’re good at working well within systems.
We like to be fed input, to take it apart, to analyze it and to see how you could perfect it even further. That’s why so many of us are drawn to video games or TV series or fictional worlds with their own reward system. We like to figure out patterns. That’s also why we were so good at school - school is a fairly easy system.
Once you’ve seen through which lessons will be important for a test, once you notice how teachers stress certain things more than others, once you notice you really only need to pay attention in class and you’ll spare yourself so much trouble, once you notice that doing your homework actually does help, once you notice these few pillars of school, you’re set, man.
I’d like to compare this to thinking on two different levels: a life-level (where you actually do stuff) and a meta-level (where you think about doing the stuff). My preferred analogy for this is a cube.
Ideally, you first figure out the shape of the cube (meta-level) and, once you’re comfortably settled into the system, you work within it (life-level). I’d say that most people operate this way, but NGS are …a little obsessed with this. The basic idea is that the system must first be perfect (or perfectly understood) before it is implemented, so it runs smoothly.
This is what I mean when I say we’re trouble-shooters. We detect the trouble ahead of time and pew, pew, pew. And, as I said, this works with video games. And books. And school. And subjects. But life? Life looks a little more like this:
No one’s (yet) succeeded to fit life into this box.
“But”, a little voice inside you says, “But I can try!” (and another, more smug voice, says “And who’s to say I’m not the one to succeed anyway?”)
And, well, I’ve got good news for you! You’ve already tried! That’s why you’re here. In limbo.
You and I both, we’ve tried to figure out the perfect recipe for life. We tried to figure out when to best get up, when to best go to sleep, what the perfect conditions for studying are, what best to study in the first place, what artsy pursuits to keep doing to flex creativity, but to also focus on practical things and how to figure out the whole family and friends-thing and schedule it somewhere in between and maybe write a book or two. You’ve tried to create the box. I’ve tried to create the box. We both failed.
Let me show you a highly artistic representation of what your brain has looked like lately:
Okay, fine, I’ll invest a bit more time:
There, that’s your mind. Pulling in every single direction. Is it really a surprise that you’re not going anywhere? Y’know this meme?
Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. Now, if you’re anything like me, you’ll have a whiny voice at the back of your head going “But picking fewer battles is defeat! I’m sure I’ll conquer it somehow!”
Well, then, let me mindslap you with the cold, hard truth: No. What you’re doing right now, that’s defeat.
This is DEFEAT. You’re not going anywhere and you’re disrespecting yourself, your mind and the subjects you’re interacting with by spending a fraction of a thought on them. You’re just using them as stepping stones. They deserve better. You deserve better. That’s why you fail to say it proudly. You know that, at some point, you looked at the big, huge mess that is life, realized “I won’t figure this out” and said “Well, I’ll stop trying, I guess.”
I’ll talk more about this in my “Yearn for friendship”-post, but for now, the main take-away is:
You won’t be done with figuring out life any time soon.
So, don’t think “I want to be done with this.”
Think “I want to be doing this.”
Step out of the meta-level into the life-level. It’s okay not to perfectly understand life right now. You’ll figure it out.Trust me, you’ll figure it out. But only by doing things.
Because, see, NGS may be trouble-shooters, but the trouble-shooting isn’t the fun part. It’s the first step to entering a magical world with which you can interact, be it maths, or Middle Earth, or a birthday party.
We like to think.
And you’ve been depriving yourself of the fun of thinking by thinking you have to do it in a perfect way.
“But what if it’s not perfect?”
“That’s okay. You’ll get better. And something imperfect that’s striving to be good is always better than nothing at all. Some things you figure out by doing. Life is one of those things. Imagine you’re in a dark street and you want to illuminate it. You can either miserably sit in darkness and try to figure out a way to turn on all lights at once, or you can start with one and let the sight of snowflakes or petals welling up underneath it give you strength for the next. Allow yourself little successes. Allow yourself to have fun with imperfect things. Make the first step. Let it give you strength for the next.”
“But what if I lose time?”
“Be patient. Life will literally last all your life. This is as much time as you’re ever gonna get. Allow yourself to take this time and to take it slow. Again: think not about getting it done, but about the joy of doing it. Time spent doing the thing you love is never lost time. Put the pressure of your shoulders. Trust me, if you take it slow, your brain will speed up because it has breathing room.
Let me repeat this:
If you take it slow
your brain will speed up.
So, allow your brain to think like this:
Be patient. I cannot stress this enough. Be. Patient.
Time is not your enemy that you have to outrace. Time is your partner, whom you have to trust. Time helps you to grow. Time helps you to understand. Time literally helps you to BE. For me, the phrase that really struck a chord with me somehow was
“I will grow as my hair did”, because it a) shows how long it can take for tiny changes to become visible, and how b) they do become visible in the end.)
“But I don’t want to completely lose my grip on the meta-level! I don’t just want to blindly run into one direction!”
“I get you. So did I. So here’s what I did: I made a pact with myself.
On the 25th of every month (because my birthday is on the 25th, but pick whichever day you like best), I ascend to the meta-level and critically assess my own situation.
I exit the cube and check if I like what the cube looks like right now.
No? Okay, time to introduce some big changes.
Yes? Okay, carry on as before.
I actually wrote down basic rules for what life in the cube looks like (when to do laundry, etc.), so I wouldn’t have to worry about it during the month and let me tell you, it works great. During the month, I just let my mind slice and dice away (I’ll talk more about the mind as a weapon in the next post) and once a month, I check if I like the results. For me, at least, it’s the perfect arrangement.
So, be patient. And watch Hyouka - it’s about this very struggle and the MC slowly realizes that, sometimes, it’s worth to spend energy, mind-power and time on certain things. Some things… just take time. And that’s okay.
(Here’s the masterpost for all the posts in this series: x)
