A note to younger me.. And a many of you.. I just came across my own answer on Quora to the question, "What is some advice that most college students are not ever likely to hear?", and here it was:
Do not procrastinate. It is not as fancy as it looks earlier.
Most of the college students or in fact, a whole lot of people in the world like to procrastinate. This starts from the college days. Before college, your parents police your actions and always try to make sure you are doing things as soon as you know you need to finish at some point.
When you come to a college, you yourself are responsible for your actions, and this is when the concept of procrastination is seeded. You have a lot of distractions, friends to get drunk with, movies to watch, football games to play, girlfriends to date, and before you know, studies become your last priority, and you start being inspired from the misinterpreted quotes like, "Live life to the fullest, live in the present, don't worry about the future."
You see that everybody around you fancies the idea of working at the last moment, you see a lot of funny videos and stories/comic strips about procrastination, something like this:
So all in all, procrastination is the new "cool" thing you start enjoying in life. Meanwhile, before you know, the next homework deadline comes close. Then you pull an all-nighter struggling with the lecture notes, and somehow manage to finish your homework. A lot of you go even further in that course, and just copy some or all of the homework from a friend and prefer to wait till the mid terms are here, and then struggle.
So all this time, you keep learning habit of sweeping things under the carpet, and come in flying colors. This may or may not be true that you could have done way better had you not been postponing things all the time without a reason, but this no less true that there will be very few times when you will not think, "It could be much better if I had some more time", and that is very true. Unless you have an IQ of 130 or something, the performance improves if you get more time to prepare.
Time flies and soon you are walking home with the degree.
Anyway, you still have done a good job, and in this whole course, you keep learning how to postpone things, and/or find excuses to postpone things, and things drastically change, and that is when the trouble starts.
The environment is entirely different now and your job now needs a lot of self-motivation. By this time, the habit of procrastination is deeply embedded in you and you start postponing office assignments, or research experiments, the funding application that you had to write, or even important life plans - just like you did in the college days.
Only that now, things cannot be resolved so fast.
Life needs to be lived on a different pattern now, and by the time you understand this, you have had paid a price for the habit. The old habit dies hard, but if you are lucky enough, you flex fast and get away after paying a small price. A lot others, it costs more, and another chunk just keeps paying the price. They keep missing the real life deadline, just because they kept sticking to a seemingly cool habit.
The whole process of adjusting and readjusting is very painful and strenuous, costs up to different extents and in "real" life, gives you big dents, and always leaves you wondering, "I wish I had started earlier, this would have been lot easier then."
Do not procrastinate. It is not as fancy as it looks earlier.
Most of the college students or in fact, a whole lot of people in the world like to procrastinate. This starts from the college days. Before college, your parents police your actions and always try to make sure you are doing things as soon as you know you need to finish at some point.
When you come to a college, you yourself are responsible for your actions, and this is when the concept of procrastination is seeded. You have a lot of distractions, friends to get drunk with, movies to watch, football games to play, girlfriends to date, and before you know, studies become your last priority, and you start being inspired from the misinterpreted quotes like, "Live life to the fullest, live in the present, don't worry about the future."
You see that everybody around you fancies the idea of working at the last moment, you see a lot of funny videos and stories/comic strips about procrastination, something like this:
So all in all, procrastination is the new "cool" thing you start enjoying in life. Meanwhile, before you know, the next homework deadline comes close. Then you pull an all-nighter struggling with the lecture notes, and somehow manage to finish your homework. A lot of you go even further in that course, and just copy some or all of the homework from a friend and prefer to wait till the mid terms are here, and then struggle.
So all this time, you keep learning habit of sweeping things under the carpet, and come in flying colors. This may or may not be true that you could have done way better had you not been postponing things all the time without a reason, but this no less true that there will be very few times when you will not think, "It could be much better if I had some more time", and that is very true. Unless you have an IQ of 130 or something, the performance improves if you get more time to prepare.
Time flies and soon you are walking home with the degree.
Anyway, you still have done a good job, and in this whole course, you keep learning how to postpone things, and/or find excuses to postpone things, and things drastically change, and that is when the trouble starts.
The environment is entirely different now and your job now needs a lot of self-motivation. By this time, the habit of procrastination is deeply embedded in you and you start postponing office assignments, or research experiments, the funding application that you had to write, or even important life plans - just like you did in the college days.
Only that now, things cannot be resolved so fast.
Life needs to be lived on a different pattern now, and by the time you understand this, you have had paid a price for the habit. The old habit dies hard, but if you are lucky enough, you flex fast and get away after paying a small price. A lot others, it costs more, and another chunk just keeps paying the price. They keep missing the real life deadline, just because they kept sticking to a seemingly cool habit.
The whole process of adjusting and readjusting is very painful and strenuous, costs up to different extents and in "real" life, gives you big dents, and always leaves you wondering, "I wish I had started earlier, this would have been lot easier then."
