Dear Diary
Well today is both a good and a bad day. Good in the sense that I have finished all my term one assessments - Bad in the sense that I have not done so well in some of them.
English ADV - 13/20 (Rank 8X/2XX)
Chemistry - ~25/30 (Rank 3X/8X)
Physics - Not returned
Math 2/3 - Not returned
Economics- Not returned
Although these results are a bit shoddy I still have the confidence to keep trying. To remain focused on my goal I have figured out the reason that most people stray off track. Heres some extremely valuable advice that I would like to share with some people - I kind of took this from an article so credits to David for writing this.
We have two basic motivators in life: beneficial desires that encourage us to take useful action and potential risks that discourage us from taking action in case we get a bad result and end up worse off.
We always seek to fulfill beneficial desires as they deliver good results and make us feel good. However, it's always difficult to maintain interest and attention in a beneficial desire that is years away from fulfillment. It's not that we don't want the end result but it's because we get distracted. We crave beneficial results and good feelings right now and so we look for things around us that will do that. Equally so, when something bad happens to us and feel negative emotions we first seek an escape from those bad feelings by avoiding the thing(s) that caused thme in the first place and then we seek to soothe the pain by doing something pleasurable instead. This all adds up to making it easy to lose sight of long term objectives no matter how beneficial they are.
So, what can you do about this? One thing is to lock yourself into a process that will deliver the end result more-or-less by default so long as you keep plugging away and that's what education does for you. The process is organised for you and you don't have to work it all out, or prepare it, or prove it. As long as you keep turning up and doing your assignments then you will get there.
The difficulty is if you don't like the process that you are going through. If every day you feel bad about what you have to go through then your instincts will continuously cause you to seek an escape from pain and methods to feel pleasure. So if your studies feel like a drag then it's important to identify what the real problem is. It's either that you don't enjoy the subject and you never will, that you don't have the basic intelligence or abilities necessary to 'make the grade' and you never will, or it's that you don't have good methods to make learning, studying, organising yourself and following through easy and consistent.
If it's the first reason then I recommend choosing something else to do otherwise you embark upon a path of learning and an eventual career that you pretty much hate and that's going to cause a lot of trouble unless you choose to accept the need and decide to find ways to like it. If it's the second reason then accept that your aspirations are beyond your physical or mental ability. It sucks to do that but attempting to do the impossible is only going to end up with failure. Think about the fundamental desires that you seek to achieve rather than getting fixated upon a specific end result. If you know what emotional or mental fulfillment you are looking for then you can find alternatives to get that satisfaction and in my opinion that's what truly counts at the end of the day - your satisfaction and not specific results to show off.
If it's the third reason then get on top of your own personal organisation and work methods. I have lots of ways to help you there but that's the stuff that you have to pay for. It took me a long time to devise methods that make it as easy and consistent for me to get things done as I do now, so I'm not giving it away.
What I can recommend that you do is to assemble a set of photos together of the things that you want in the long term. Put them onto a sheet of paper, print them out and put them in places where you will see them and notice them everyday, such as on your bedroom door, on your bathroom mirror or somewhere like that. This will keep reminding your subconscious of what it is that you truly seek in the long term and your subconscious responds better to pictures than to written words. Eventually your subconscious will keep guiding you to take actions that lead you to your long term result even when things get difficult.
This helps in the long term, but day-to-day you need robust, reliable and easy to use methods that make the day-to-day process of studying easy, relatively painfree and that give you a high-level of certainty that you will reach a successful conclusion so long as you keep plugging away.
Even though my exam marks are sh*t I have Summer holidays coming up an plan to utilize it effectively - keeping in mind that a healthy balance between work and fun is required.
I should be getting most of these assessments back within the following week so I'll keep you guys posted on how I go.
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