It’s that time of year again! Just under a week ago, I officially finished my first term of my third year of university. While this didn’t feel like my most challenging term academic-wise, it was the most challenging term overall. As has become a tradition, I am taking this chance to reflect on seven lessons I learned this year.
Lesson One: Feeling busy/overstimulated/constitutively busy is not a measurement of how busy you actually are.
I hear so much about “insanely busy” people, particularly from mentors I look up to. Because I have varied interests myself, I find myself regularly trying to take on more work in various spheres of my life. This term, this practise of mine caused me to feel overstimulated all the time. I’d be taking calls speed-walking class, meetings on the train home, sending emails all the time and feeling I had barely enough time to engage in the things that truly mattered to me. But I still felt stressed, and so I concluded I was too busy. It wasn’t until exam season started that I truly saw how much I’d been trying to do, and also reflected on how much I over-inflated the stress they caused. I realized that using my stress level as a litmus test for how busy I am is not a good measuring tool. You could be overwhelmed about the smallest task or unbothered by a monstrous exam. Instead, I learned I need to let my brain dictate how often I feel stressed.
Lesson Two: Lean on people without shame
Different people’s skills, strengths, experiences or viewpoints can lead to outcomes you’d never imagined. It is richer to capitalize off of these experiences than to remain alone. So need someone’s guidance or depend on someone is not taking a shortcut; it is a great way to learn and achieve more in the little time we have. But here is the paradox: while I know and have experienced these benefits, I’ll revert to my individual workflow more often than I’d like. This term, I’ve boiled the root cause down to two possibilities: 1) hamster-wheel thinking, and 2) trying to “do life” alone. By hamster-wheel thinking, I mean spending five hours on a task because you took the long route rather than investing one hour into learning about a way to spend only 30 minutes on the same task to yield the same outcome. By trying to “do life” alone, I mean that feeling of “this is challenging, but I want to do this on my own”. While I’ve encountered these two inert blockades, I’ve realized I need others in my life if I have any shot at achieving my lofty life goals. I believe that this realization comes once you have the maturity to admit that your everyday can be made better with other people’s help. I’ve learned that I need to develop this maturity so I can reach out to others faster and achieve better things.
Lesson Three: Self-talk is very powerful. Use it more often.
I’ve realized that feelings of pain, discomfort, anxiety or tiredness are not indicators that I’ve reached my limit. They are just minor roadblocks that can be surmounted using the right tools. Self-talk has been a tremendous help in these moments. I began self-talk to get myself through workouts, and am now practising implementing it into my academic/professional life. Self-talk also serves as an opportunity for me to regularly check-in with myself and readjust or refocus if needed.
Lesson Four: Having no plan is planning for failure.
At the beginning of the day, week, month or just any day you realize you need to refocus, you need to plan. It is a daily habit of mine to open my laptop, look at the first tab I had open from the previous day and continue working on that task. When in reality, there are five other tasks I should be prioritizing that day. I’ve been burned so many times by doing this, and planning has been the one thing to be saving me from the jaws of my laptop. Now this term, I realized I needed to become a consistent planner. Sometimes, I wouldn’t plan out of fear that I wouldn’t be able to adhere to it. Other times, I’d feel thir urge to jump right into something more productive, more actionable, more challenging than something as easy, idyllic and slow as planning. Without structure or any guidelines to adhere to, the days seem to simply flow by with you always feel busy. Choosing to plan represents a choice to be in control, even if this plan is overly ambitious.
Lesson Five: Choose to take breaks. Taking breaks requires work and investment, too.
When I get mentally exhausted (eg. after big projects, a slew of due dates or exams), I’d wake up thinking “okay, now I’ll take a break and just take things easy”. However, in my “taking things easy” phase, I’d miss out on some great opportunity or forget about some deadline. I’d begin to feel inconsistent and struggle to take meaningful breaks (for example, watching YouTube is NOT a break. I finally understood this year). I learned that to stay present, consistent and prevent massive stretches of low-energy days, I need to consistently build in breaks. Further, I need to pushing against that signals that tell me to take a break; instead, I must concede that I need them and deliberately use them to decompress. Saying I’ll take a break “one day” is a recipe for disaster.
Lesson Six: Surround yourself with people you want to be more like
When you are around likeminded people, you get to learn alongside and be influenced by them. It exposes you to the lifestyle you want to lead and serves as motivation to curate it together. During the time I spend around people I admire or share goals with, I feel my brain come alive in some magical “second gear”; something that may have felt out of reach a couple hours ago seems to be only just outside arms reach. It helps to build a broader community of drive. When you know you are on the same journey as someone else, it can become easier to get projects started and to keep going.
Lesson Seven: Choose to do hard things, and fail faster at them.
Many many times, I find myself trying to reconcile my ambition with this odd sadistic self-pity. This would keep me enticed to make safe decisions which weren’t fulfilling because they still left me far from my goals. This term, I realized that there are more roads to shortcuts than there are roads to fulfillment. The latter of these roads promises failure ad setback. It’s twisted; it’s the one whose end I cannot see. It’s scarier, and requires a lot more from me that I have the capacity to give right now. every day, we have choices to make. Which path do we choose to walk along, and how far does it place us from our long term goals? I realized I don’t want to compromise on the longer-term goals I have, and I don’t want to long for the destination without even being on the right path. A life compromising on the impact I want to have isn’t a life I want to lead. But I don’t want to over-glamourize this “hard road” either. On some days, it’s a very tough choice to make. So when I get paralyzed with fear of failure or of the unknown, I try to tell myself “fail faster“. Choose to experience this failure today so that tomorrow, you’ll know better.
While far from extensive, these lessons distill the “coming of age” I feel positioned in. What do productivity and life goals really mean to my 20 year-old self? How practical are my life goals? Plan and dream as I may, do I really know I’ll be able to get there? How can I be certain that the floor won’t collapse fom under my feet and I’ll tumble down into depths I’ve never experienced? Will I even be able to dream the way I do now in such a position? I ponder these questions often, and I have answers to none of them. The uncertainty is frightening.
But as long as I try to challenge myself, I know I’ll be improving myself somehow. And perhaps we are overcomplicating our lives by thinking we need to work towards a formula or pre-prescribed goal. Maybe life just asks that we make time to learn lessons and share them with others. So, content with my 21 lessons, onwards I go.
Good lessons! Keep writing!