Success is about being productive when you don’t want to be

From last Saturday to Tuesday, I was in the computer science lab for about 10 hours a day. Every day, I’d go to the lab from 12pm to 10pm but sometimes I’d work until 4am. I was working on my final project — a board game called Lines of Action.

Combined with the ongoing work throughout the semester, I’m exhausted. All I want to do is sit in bed, watch The Mentalist and play Fifa. I want to sleep in past 10:30am. I don’t want to be productive.

If you can’t be nice for other people, be nice for yourself

A couple of weeks ago, I emailed my math professor telling him that I really enjoyed his class and that he’s doing a fantastic job. He emailed me back offering me a job.

He wanted me to help him redesign his course. He says that the goal of the class has become unclear and because so many people take his class, making sure everyone learns the material and keeps pace with the class is hard. So he wants me to help him by redesigning class notes, helping him redesign his curriculum, and giving him suggestions that could make his class as good as possible. He also wants to put the course on edX sometime within the next year and wants me to help him migrate the class to be available in an online format.

Not your typical job as an undergraduate washing test tubes.

Sometimes we forget that there’s much more to life than school

I failed my computer science exam last week. For a couple of hours after the exam, I was feeling hopeless. How am I going to major in computer science if I can’t even pass this exam? How am I going to get a job? I usually get A’s on my exams and I was kicking myself for not studying more.

The day before the exam, I didn’t study at all. Instead, I went to a Lindsey Stirling concert and then later went to celebrate Obama’s victory over Romney.

And you know what? After those few hours were over, I don’t regret it at all. I would still go to the concert and then go celebrate Obama’s victory. I don’t know if I’ll ever see Lindsey Stirling live again and she was amazing. I definitely won’t ever see Obama take office again.

Affirmative action is a necessity

I used to really oppose affirmative action. Whenever the topic would come up in conversation, I’d always strongly argue against it. It’s an unfair policy. Why should students be penalized or rewarded for having a certain ethnicity in college admissions? That’s out of our control. Last year, I even took a survey in which I voted that I was against affirmative action.

But after spending a year and a half in college, my stance has changed. I’d like to take that vote back. Berkeley doesn’t have an affirmative action policy, so I see first hand what it’s like to not have one. And what I see is this: the lack of diversity throughout the campus is detrimental to student learning.

Goal setting is broken: It’s okay to not have a long term goal

For a long time, I believed that I was wasting my life because I didn’t have a goal. The conventional wisdom is that if you don’t have a goal, then it’s necessary to set one. We’re told that long term goals give our life direction and without one we’re just wasting time. There are many people who buy into this way of thinking and then worry and think it’s a bad thing that they don’t have a goal.

But this way of thinking is wrong. We need to unlearn goal setting because goal setting is a backwards process.

Forget about grades, just enjoy this life

Going through schooling, we’re preached the importance of having good grades. We’re told that if we get good grades, then we’ll be set for life. We’ll get into college. We’ll get into grad school. We’ll get a good job, have a family, live a good life, and live happily ever after. So we follow this mindset. We sacrifice sleep, our health, our mental stability just to earn an A. It’s okay to suffer now in order to get good grades because we set ourselves up for success later.

But this way of thinking is backwards. We don’t need to suffer now. We can live happily, get good grades, and let our happiness lead us to finding success. And we don’t even need good grades. Just live happily and let our happiness lead us to finding success. Steve Jobs had a 2.65 GPA in high school and dropped out of college. Colin Powell barely graduated high school while Richard Branson didn’t even make it through high school. Malcolm Gladwell couldn’t get into graduate school because his undergrad grades were so poor.

Stop comparing yourself to others

Yesterday, I saw an article about a book a 17 year old is writing. It’s about education. He’s proposing a completely new system to education including getting rid of the standardized tests like the SAT. I think it’s great, we need more awareness that the current state of education sucks.

And then I wonder why I’m not writing a book. I should be doing that. I’m three years older than Nikhil is and I have the same goal that he does: positively change education.

So I tell myself that I’m going to write a book. I tell myself that I’m starting today. I don’t know anything about the process it takes to write a book, so I do some research. Writing a book is going to be harder than I thought. I don’t have time to write a couple hours every day; I’m a university student and I need to learn how to parse inputs using regular expressions by tomorrow. My motivation starts to waver.