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‘Don’t Settle For Less’ Is Seldom The Best Advice For Go-getters
A guide for achieving ambitious goals.
Growing up, I’ve heard advice from people of influence, asking their audience to set their goals high and never settle for less.
This, as inspiring as it sounds, is the reason behind many unrealized goals. This is because we misinterpret advice.
Growing up with this advice sounding like church bells, I aimed to enroll in the local medical college. I had friends who wanted to be lawyers, engineers, doctors, and whatever prestigious profession they desired.
We had these aspirations because those were the most prestigious professions. They were not necessarily what we loved to be.
We wrote the UTME — a substitute for the SAT in my country — to compete for slots at a local university.
First, you have to beat a national benchmark to get screened by a local university or an even higher standard set by individual departments. Of course, our desired disciplines were competitive — and will always be.
Often times, the selection process doesn’t test your intelligence level. In some schools, it’s a bunch of disorganized screening processes. So disorganized that I wonder how they even get to choose the right candidates. In my time at…
