Mental Pressure (Stress)
Schools and colleges neither taught us how to learn from our failures nor to compete with ourselves. Everyone taught us to compete with others and always win, never fail. If anyone fails in school, people will scold, shout, and make fun of it. They won’t ask to learn from the failure. Such situations are crucial. I have seen a lot of folks who give up once they fail. Very few get a lot of learning from that failure. Those who learn from frustration get success.
Many of us have been feeling pressure from our schooling. Some of us still think that, during schooling, many parents say to their son/daughter that their neighbor’s son/daughter got 90 % in 10th standard and you have to get at least 91 % else “We will lose our respect” (in Hindi “ नाक कट जायेगी ”.)
For respect of the parents, students start compromising. Stop doing those things that make them happy for example stop playing games, or having fun.
Does that help? Ask yourself if you have been in such scenario? I think it does not, even it makes worst.
I think we should not compromise on making fun because it makes you happy. Once you are happy you will be more productive.
Once we start doing hard work for competing with a neighbor or a colleague we feel negative and bad.
For those who don’t know about me. I have a diploma background and currently working as a software developer. During my STEP Internship at ThoughtWorks, we used to have a lot of written tests. Initially, because of my schooling habits, I always used to be curious to know my rank on a test. Most of the time I used to get very low marks. Getting fewer marks always puts me under pressure.
Initially, I was not telling all this to anyone and I was trying to show off that I am good. One day I was talking to one of my colleagues about this, and he started asking questions. Here is that conversation,
He : What are your worries ?
Me : I might get terminated because of bad performance?
He : Why do you think your performance is bad ?
Me: My marks are always less then others.
He : Is it better than your last marks ?
Me:Some times
He:It is the big problem , you need to fix it here. It has to be always better than last marks, stop worrying about others marks. You just focus on learnings, not to be better than others, just to be better than yourself. You don’t know about others background , their speed of learning, and others stuff about them, you know better than about you. So focus on yourself.
My colleague reminded me of a scene from a 3-idiots movie.
Where Rancho says to Raju Rastogi “Don’t study for marks study for excellence.”
He: If you focus on learning instead of survival then you will always survive.
He: What in case you are survival but not able to learn?.
Will you be happy, or you will feel bad about the facts you have not learnt enough because of focusing on survival instead of learnings. Even if you get terminated you will have the good knowledge you will get another job.
I also appreciate the facts during the STEP there are a lot of difference from education system of schooling and colleges. In the colleges, teachers focused on their subject and they don’t want jump anywhere else. While during the STEP we do have awesome mentors with great experience. They don’t focus only on the subject.They focus on teaching, “learn how to learn”. Sometimes it is very specific to a person, few are a quick learner, and few are slow. It is everywhere even in schools but in school teacher don’t do anything. I think STEP mentors do find the way to teach everyone with their own pace. They never taught to compete with each other, they taught us to be always better than what you were yesterday.
I would love to hear any comments or feedback. Please feel free to contact me directly to help me improve, or you can write comments.
Emails: yadavseetaram66@gmail.com
