How to Think as a Student

This post is for students who choose to pursue academic excellence. Many students may experience better or worse educational practices during their studies. Regardless of your experience, you may still decide whether or not you want to pursue the highest possible goals achievable in academia. If you choose this path to excellence, then you should embrace a new culture, a mindset that will shape your reality from now on. In this post, I describe 8 rules that will hopefully help you to integrate with this kind of culture. It is important to change your mindset for the better, because your actions from now on will impact your future greatly. Now, I leave you with the 8 rules that will be your first informal introduction to achieving academic success.

Be curious and explore a lot

You need to get comfortable with being suspicious of everything you are taught in your classes and asking a lot of questions about them. This doesn’t mean you should show off unnecessarily and be paranoid about what others think about your intelligence. It means that your reactions need to be completely honest and genuine. Even though you think your questions or concerns might come out as silly, you should not be afraid to ask them and to find out the root cause of your concerns. This is how you become a true scientist of the future. You should have a truly curious and honest mindset to the point that you actually do want to face with the things that you fear the most.

Expect great difficulty but greater reward

Don’t panic when you struggle with something that is being taught in a course. Nothing truly rewarding has ever come out of doing something so obvious. The greater the difficulty, the greater is the reward of achieving it. You should not be afraid of difficulty; in fact, you should instead be excited when something difficult comes up, because you should know that it is something that is pushing the boundaries of your knowledge. By tackling something difficult, it is almost always certain that you will improve signficantly by the end of the process. Even though the thing you encounter might look like impossible to be cracked, it might still be very worth of trying to crack it.

Imagine a hypothetical scenario: suppose that there is a 100 ton rock in front of you, which you would want to lift up by using your human body. You may think that there is no point in even trying to lift it up since it won’t move even a bit in 100 years. Well, you are probably right about the part that it is highly likely that it won’t move in 100 years. The part you probably miss is the fact that how trying to lift something that heavy will improve your power and shape your body greatly. Just don’t try to get under it desparately because you might also get yourself killed that way. Even though the rock won’t ever move, you body and mind will change and improve. So, is it really worthless to pursue an impossible goal in life? Well, as you see, it might very well be worth of pursuing one; not because the initial goal will be achieved, but because you will achieve something that you wouldn’t if you didn’t pursue a goal this hard. That’s what I mean when I say “trust the process” – you may not see progress quickly, but the progress will always be there, waiting to shine on you in the right moment. Keep in mind that the important thing is finding the balance between trying to lift the rock and letting it be.

Do NOT study for grades

Grades are not the final destination. I know it may seem like that they are the most important thing for your future career, but believe me when I say this: greater intelligence leads to better grades more than how much better grades leads to greater intelligence! Grades are not to be seen as the product of your intellectual capacity, as long as you use them as feedback to improve yourself. I have failed many exams, many classes, many subjects… Yet here I am, live in flesh, and not in a miserable position by any reasonable life standard. When you fail, and YOU WILL FAIL, don’t lose your hope nor your discipline. Look at your grades once, and then go study the things you failed on. Don’t be afraid of owning your failures. Be confident enough to speak about them when you are asked, and be dedicated to work constantly on the knowledge you have lacked to the point where you don’t even feel bad for failing in the past.

Try to do everything by yourself

Own the work you do! It is not about submitting solutions for the problems your teachers give you. You need to try to be the master of your craft. True mastery of a subject comes from your autonomy, leadership, and responsibility in finding out a way to solve its underlying problems by using as minimal number of tools as possible. The less the number of tools you use to solve a craft a solution, the more you become the true master of your craft. In turn, the more mastery you gain, the more confident you become in your ability to tackle harder problems.

Gain intuition first, knowledge comes later

It is very crucial for you to get a feeling for the thing you are learning. Knowledge becomes a product of memorization if you don’t posses the right intuitions for the things that you “know”. Building things on your own from scratch (4) helps you gain vast amount of intution. You should always develop gut feelings for the things that you are taught in your classes. If you speak about something that you don’t quite feel right about or lack instinctive for it, then you haven’t understood it in the first place; there is a big chance that you have just memorized the thing. This is very common pattern among the students: most of their knowledge unfortunately comes from memorization rather than their intuitions. Knowledge without intuitions gives you cold-heartedly memorized facts; knowledge with intuitions gives you true expertise and mastery of the things you speak of. You will know when you develop the intuition for a topic; typically you may get this feeling of getting very passionate about the topic all of a sudden, your heart beats may increase, and your mouth may get very watery, frankly speaking.

Progress takes time

Try not to be too harsh to yourself when you are falling behind from time to time. It happens to the best of us, all the time. Your speed in grasping new concepts does not define your intellectual capacity for grasping them later on. Sometimes it is the passing of the time that makes things straight for you. It doesn’t mean you should lay on your back and do completely nothing about the thing you struggle understanding; in fact, you should always allocate some amount of time to think about the very thing that you are struggling with while expecting no visible progress during that one week. Do not worry too much, you will start seeing progress in a few months if you keep showing up for it every day.

Consistency beats motivation

It helps to be motivated and hyped up about something, obviously. However, you should always keep in mind that motivation is really temporary, and what you need more of is consistency and perseverance. You must embrace disciplined mind at all costs! “What’s the difference between the two?”, you may ask. Well, motivation is about getting excited to do something because you probably think you will get it done pretty soon; in contrast, consistency is all about doing the things over and over again, as an emotionless robot, even though you are not seeing the results yet. Close your eyes, and believe in the process (2): believe that this non-ending cycle of doing the same kinds of things on a daily basis over and over again will surely get your somewhere greater.

Be kind to others

Help those who need it, teach those who lack it. There is no need to be greedy or very self-oriented. You are a part of the team with all of your group mates in it. Explain them the things you understand, ask them to explain you the things you don’t understand. It is okay to have a competitive mindset, but you should never let yourself cheat or drag others down in order to get yourself up. It is only a healthy competition if you do nothing but work on your own lacking aspects to move up. We do need a healthy competition and you should definitely have a competitive mindset to a certain extent.