I asked this question today, as I came to class for the first time in 1.5 weeks. Everything was exciting, fresh and new. I was behind in material and loved it. As the prof drew new formulas and equations on the board my mind lit up with connections that weren't fed to me, postulating how this related to earlier concepts with being explicitly told, quickly flipping through the text needing to extract information missed lectures in minutes to keep up. It was a total rush; It was fun.
Apparently, I self-handicap. I intentionality make life harder for me. After walking through a number of varying situations in the past where I have done this I narrowed it down to 3 reasons:
- It's fun to be in the fray. Anyone who has been in a hackathon knows how addictive the time constraint can be. The panic, the spurts of creativity, quickly overcoming obstacles and finally squeezing everything in last minute is intoxicating. I feel the same way about everything. So when I hit a lecture and all the material is new and exciting and it's tricky to keep up, it's amazing. If I go to every lecture, I don't feel challenged, it's like playing on easy mode. I just feel like a dumb sponge absorbing the concept sand spitting them back out verbatim.
- When I fail it gives me an excuse to save my ego. I consider myself a smart guy. When my actions, like getting a 40% on a test, tell me otherwise, I get a lot of cognitive dissonance going on (this is when the brain gets mismatched information, fun fact: the brain HATES this, most weird psychological behaviors can be attributed to attempting to resolve cognitive dissonance). However if I can tell myself "Oh you did well for only giving yourself 3 hours to study", BAM! Dissonance gone, and , in my eyes, I'm still a smart guy.
- When I succeed it gives me an excuse to brag. I've never been one to play life normally. I love telling and creating stories. So, playing by the book, studying all weekend, and getting the standard 80-90% on the midterm is normal. If I told someone that they would be like "Well, of course you did... that's how it works." However, if I studied for only 4 hours, and had to reverse engineer a theorem during the midterm, and came up with a crazy way to solve question 3 because I didn't memorize the procedure, and only got 60%, I am more proud of that 60 then a well studied, easy-to-get 80.
So, how can I use this realization as a new tool to be better in school? No idea. It's a shame it took my 4 years to really understand this about me, just as I'm on my way out.
Thanks for posting this analysis. It's interesting to see how other people act, and especially how they think about how they act. I do the same sort of stuff - stop going to class, hand assignments in at the last second with as little time put into them as I can manage, reinvent the wheel on tests (that is serious fun). But I see a different cause. I'd chalk it up to my enormous ego and that I'm lazy.
ReplyDeleteThe ego fits with a lot of what you said - to me, your points read as 'things I do because I have a big ego'. Demanding a challenge that meets you, maintaining a personal self-image of high intelligence, and finding reasons to brag are all aspects of egotistical behaviour. I think that, as a variation on the bragging point, I just like to show off how smart I am. If I'm smart enough to do what other people have to work hard at without putting in nearly as much as they did, then I feel good about myself. Kind of like a showoff on a sports team: I'm not building skill by putting in time, I'm just trying to prove to everyone that I was born with skill. Which is really stupid, and incorrect. But whenever I can convince someone it's true, I feel fantastic.
Laziness is the really big other half to this. Maybe laziness could be rephrased as "a lack of discipline". I constantly tell myself that I work hard, but if I really objectively analyse it, I probably sleep twice as much as the people around me. I spend countless hours staring at a computer screen and not getting things done. I just read things. Not even useful things. Why? Because it's easy and it makes me *feel* busy. Regarding class attendance, first I have legitimate reasons not to go to class, and then I downgrade the importance of class in my mind, and then I use non-legitimate reasons. Things like, "I know what they're teaching today", "I really need the sleep", and "I have to shower and shave, which means I miss the next bus in 20 minutes, so I can't catch the bus for 40 minutes, meaning I won't be there until almost an hour from now, and the class starts in 15 minutes, and is an hour and a half long, so there'd only be 45 minutes left. I'll just ask someone what we did. Yay, sleep!"
My lack of self control lets my laziness rule my life, and it feeds my ego, which tells me I'm doing fine. After all, my GPA isn't horrible, right? The problem, I think, is an underappreciation of the time*effort = skill equation. Ongoing deliberate practice is what really builds skills, and unless I'm managing to do that without school, I'm just showing off how smart I was when university started.
Is there a remedy?
What I'm trying to do is to make a really big effort on deflating my ego, and on building my skill at self control. If there's something I want to do, I purposely delay it, just to prove to myself that I can. Then, when I'm just about to get what I wanted after waiting, I strike a deal with myself: wait twice as long, get twice as much. Eventually, I get what I wanted and enjoy the hell out of it, or I forget I wanted anything at all. It takes "an urge" and turns it into "a plan". But this is an anti-action strategy; it teaches me how not to do things. That's an important element of self-control, but I need to learn how to do things. How to get up and go instead of waiting on it, checking HackerNews, or laying back down and dozing. That's much harder, and I don't yet have a good strategy for it worked out.
Thanks again for making me continue to think about this stuff. :)