Our environment, the world in which we live and work, is a mirror of our attitudes and expectations.
As a child, we all go to schools to learn various concepts in a group of humans with similar mindsets, sitting together in a conducive learning environment. We grow up & enter into a college, & again we come across the similar experiences. So, why does the output or performance level of students differ from one college to other or rather at a microscopic level, within the same class?
As a part of the Lead Generation process in our company, we conducted lots of interaction sessions with the students belonging to different colleges & cities. Fortunately, I got a chance to be a part of most of these sessions & closely understand the factors impacting the mindsets & outlook of students in these colleges. In one of these sessions, a student, rather hopelessly, declared his college environment & culture as responsible for their lack of interest in their subjects (thus, in engineering) and hence lower outputs. His belief was that if they would have been studying in any of the IITs, they would have performed much better in the academics & would have been able to explore millions of other opportunities. This point raised by him turned the flow of discussions towards one of the most debated questions of our generation – How are IITs different from any other college?
My reply to his point started with a very basic fact proven by scientists worldwide that, Our brain is a highly malleable organ & the environment in which it lives & works plays a much crucial role in impacting it’s efficiency. The kind of environment to which we are exposed in our childhood times or in our college influences our habits, manners, ideologies & beliefs and hence defines the curvature of the graph of our professional career & personality development. During our graduation days in IIT, the kind of enthusiasm which most of the students exhibit to explore & learn more and more things brought that expectations of excellence in the culture over there, which kept the remaining students on their toes for their own betterment. But, the noteworthy thing is, that this environment was created by the students themselves, keeping in mind the impact which it would create on their lives.
The fact is that it’s easier to put the blame of our failures on our environment, but we never realize that it was the end product of our attitude & efforts. People blame their environment, but there is only one person to blame - and only one - themselves. Whatever we do, whatever we think, slowly & steadily it starts reframing the culture around us and after a period of time, we become an integral part of it. The lack of intent which we initially showed in our regular work, eventually becomes a part of the cocoon which we sew around us. And this is the problem faced by most of the students in current times, where gradually with our own lack of efforts to build a cohesive learning environment around us, we rather end up being a part of the environment where mediocrity becomes the target to achieve.
So stand up & break the cocoon around you. Start building an environment, where excellence & determination are the supports, optimism plays the anchor role & the objective is not just to find the reasons of our failures, but to act upon them to find their solutions.
And at that moment, success would be no more unachievable.