Enjoying our studies
Hi
Most of us want changes in our lives. It may be starting an exercise programme to be in better shape, enrolling for an online course for studying something new or learning a musical instrument. Students preparing for board examinations and various entrance examinations would like to make a schedule and follow it. As James Clear, the author of the bestselling book Atomic Habits, points out, changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you are willing to stick with them for years.
But most of our decisions are short-lived. Around eighty per cent of the people who make new year resolutions fail to stick to them by the end of January. There are many reasons for this. I consider the most important one is that we don’t enjoy whatever we do or plan to do.
When we go through our syllabus in school, we observe that there are some subjects we like, but there are some other subjects or topics we don’t like. But we have to study giving equal importance to both. To be successful, one has to do well even on things which one doesn’t like.
While studying something you don’t like, you must think that it is part of something larger that will benefit you in the future. Scoring heavily in board examinations or getting a high rank in an entrance examination will eventually help you get admission to a prestigious institute. This will finally lead you to secure a good job.
In her famous book How to change, writer Katy Milkman describes how most commuters started using the stairs instead of the elevator when the stairs were transformed into a set of working piano keys; We know that we must take the stairs because it has health benefits, but we prefer the easier way. Doing the right thing is often unsatisfying in the short term. In our studies, also we follow this. We spend a lot of time on subjects which seem to be easy. Even though we know that all subjects have equal weightage in our final results, economists call this tendency to favour instantly gratifying temptations over long term rewards as ‘present bias’.
In the Piano experiment mentioned above, we found that even tasks that seem to be boring can be made enjoyable with a slight change in the approach. While studying a subject or topics which may be boring you can make it interesting by offering yourself some small reward once you complete it. It may be something like spending some time on social media or texting a friend. It can also be eating your favourite cookie from the refrigerator. Studying for half an hour and spending ten minutes on something you love to do can be a real motivator.
Finally, the song a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down from the Walt Disneys 1964 film sums up it all. Adding an element of enjoyment to any work that seems to be difficult will do the trick for us.
wishing you success
Krishna das