And when the master asks, “Why do you want to play finals?”, the Kid replies, “Because, I am still scared. Tonight when I leave this hall, I don’t want to be scared anymore. That’s why.”

It struck a chord with me. The words are so beautiful, it brought tears.

I wasn’t the greatest student in high school, and whenever I got poor grades I would explain them away by saying I just didn’t care or I was too busy or too unmotivated or (more often than not) just cared about something else. It didn’t help that I had good test performance which fed my ego and let me think I was smarter than everyone else, just relatively unmotivated. I had grossly underestimated MIT, and was left feeling so dumb.

I suffered through half a semester of differential equations before my pride let me go to R. for help. And sure enough, he took my textbook for a night to review the material (he couldn’t remember it all from third grade), and then he walked me through my difficulties and coached me. I ended up pulling a B+ at the end of a semester and avoiding that train wreck. The thing is, nothing he taught me involved raw brainpower. The more I learned the more I realized that the bulk of his intelligence and his performance just came from study and practice, and that the had amassed a large artillery of intellectual and mathematical tools that he had learned and trained to call upon. He showed me some of those tools, but what I really ended up learning was how to go about finding, building, and refining my own set of cognitive tools. I admired R., and I looked up to him, and while I doubt I will ever compete with his genius, I recognize that it’s because of a relative lack of my conviction and an excess of his, not some accident of genetics.

It’s easy to trick ourselves into thinking that “being smart” is what determines our performance. In so many ways, it’s the easiest possible explanation because it demands so little of us and immediately explains away our failings. You are facing this tension without recognizing it.

You got A’s because you studied or because the classes were easy. You got a B probably because you were so used to understanding things that you didn’t know how to deal with something that didn’t come so easily. I’m guessing that early on you built the cognitive and intellectual tools to rapidly acquire and process new information, but that you’ve relied on those tools so much you never really developed a good set of tools for what to do when those failed. This is what happened to me, but I didn’t figure it out until after I got crushed by my first semester of college. I need to ask you, has anyone ever taken the time to teach you how to study? And separately, have you learned how to study on your own in the absence of a teacher or curriculum? These are the most valuable tools you can acquire because they are the tools you will use to develop more powerful and more insightful tools. It only snowballs from there until you become like R.

In fact, I can’t think of a single one off the top of my head. People fail to graduate from MIT because they come in, encounter problems that are harder than anything they’ve had to do before, and not knowing how to look for help or how to go about wrestling those problems, burn out. The students that are successful look at that challenge, wrestle with feelings of inadequacy and stupidity, and begin to take steps hiking that mountain, knowing that bruised pride is a small price to pay for getting to see the view from the top. They ask for help, they acknowledge their inadequacies. They don’t blame their lack of intelligence, they blame their lack of motivation. I was lucky that I had someone to show me how to look for that motivation, and I’m hoping that I can be that person for you in some small capacity over the Internet. I was able to recover from my freshman year and go on to be very successful in my studies, even serving as a TA for my fellow students. When I was a senior, I would sit down with the freshmen in my dorm and show them the same things that had been shown to me, and I would watch them struggle with the same feelings, and overcome them. By the time I graduated MIT, I had become the person I looked up to when I first got in.

You’re so young, way too young to be worried about not being smart enough. Until you’re so old you start going senile, you have the opportunity to make yourself “smarter.” And I put that in quotes because “smart” is really just a way of saying “has invested so much time and sweat that you make it look effortless.” You feel like you are burnt out or that you are on the verge of burning out, but in reality you are on the verge of deciding whether or not you will burn out. It’s scary to acknowledge that it’s a decision because it puts the onus on you to to do something about it, but it’s empowering because it means there is something you can do about it.

And at last,

So do it.

Casual interest can only get you so far – if you just ‘want’ to speak a language, that gives you no edge. Who wouldn’t want that? To make real progress, that want has to become a need.

With focus and your full attention you can learn much quicker

And there is only one way the language will become a true necessity: you need to start speaking it with other people, now.

• Expertise is relative – become an expert enough to get you going. Realizing this is important as it will help us appropriately set our goals.
• Learn from Books and Experience – we need both learning and doing. A balance is required.
• Concentrate on the task at hand – enjoy the present. This keeps coming every now and then.
• Take feedback – proper constructive. It will show us room for growth.
• Make mistakes – as it says it very fascinatingly: the more quicker we get comfortable in making mistakes, the more quicker we learn and develop expertise on a subject.

It does have meaning, though. Passing the 20 percent mark means that there is 80 percent remaining. It means that for how far I have come, I have four times as many hours still to go to prove the point that it is possible to go all the way simply with determination and hard work; to prove that talent is a word we’ve created to sum up those individuals who’s persistent grinding has taken them above and beyond in their field of expertise; to make an attempt at the statement: “we are all created equal.”

“The best decision makers,” Baumeister says, “are the ones who know when not to trust themselves.”

From NyTimes article on “Do you suffer from Decision Fatigue“

Later I found a tool called BES that can limit the CPU usage of a process. Now my laptop won’t shut down.

• Work hard
• Learn your field well
• Learn other fields
• Learn about tools
• Ask questions and connect with other people
• Think about the big picture

And:

• Have patience
• And exhibit minimum maturity

Deep procrastination is not the standard urge to goof off that afflicts every college student. It’s much more powerful. A student suffering from deep procrastination will delay important work to an excessive degree. He won’t start studying until late the night before or will delay paper writing until the sun is about the rise. After a while, he might begin to chronically miss deadlines, and find himself constantly negotiating with professors about extensions. Sometimes it gets so bad that he misses the extended deadlines — failing courses instead of completing the required assignment. No matter how dire the stakes, starting work becomes an insurmountable prospect.

The only cure, as I understand, to this problem is to answer the biggest and the most important question of our lives:

figure out what you really want to accomplish at college, then choose your path based on an honest answer to this question.

Whatever is said of college is true about profession and life in general.