To prepare for the upcoming exams, I opened my slabs of textbooks one month earlier; wipe off the thin sheet of accumulated dust on each page, and in the process of doing so swap away my focus to the other things around my room. The bed looks more enticing than before, my computer, magazines and the characters outside my study room window too. It wouldn’t attract me much if I am not spellbound to the table, reading theories and concepts needed to be highlighted and jotted down to a blank piece to make vague sense out of it. Or, even if it doesn’t seem logical in the fresh sheet, at least I know I have done my part.
Flow chart and mindmaps I scrupulously drawn weren’t that interesting anymore, and often, while threading the mountains of text along the white lagoon, they either scrambled themselves together, or playing catching with my puffy bloodshot eyes, hovelling above each other or avalanche to the bottom page where the numbers lie. So, a few minutes of that tiresome activity, I give myself some excuses to take a break, and often never returned back.
I have tried my best to delay gratification – prohibiting myself to read stories, surfing Internet for two hours a day, watching just an hour of tv and so far, Confucius forbid, it has been successful. But the productivity on my study didn’t seem to catch up with the sacrifice I made. Perhaps it is still early for the urgency to kick in, since I revised two weeks before exams for my last semester, but for this sem I intend to excel unlike my previous awful average grades (1 distinc n 3 cred). But that self-actualization stage; the tip of Maslow’s Hierarchy of motivation, didn’t seemed to drive me deep enough. Distractions abound within my compound, each one very alluring, very persuasive, but very time-consuming. Maybe that’s why no one in the developed world can achieve nirvana.
Flow chart and mindmaps I scrupulously drawn weren’t that interesting anymore, and often, while threading the mountains of text along the white lagoon, they either scrambled themselves together, or playing catching with my puffy bloodshot eyes, hovelling above each other or avalanche to the bottom page where the numbers lie. So, a few minutes of that tiresome activity, I give myself some excuses to take a break, and often never returned back.
I have tried my best to delay gratification – prohibiting myself to read stories, surfing Internet for two hours a day, watching just an hour of tv and so far, Confucius forbid, it has been successful. But the productivity on my study didn’t seem to catch up with the sacrifice I made. Perhaps it is still early for the urgency to kick in, since I revised two weeks before exams for my last semester, but for this sem I intend to excel unlike my previous awful average grades (1 distinc n 3 cred). But that self-actualization stage; the tip of Maslow’s Hierarchy of motivation, didn’t seemed to drive me deep enough. Distractions abound within my compound, each one very alluring, very persuasive, but very time-consuming. Maybe that’s why no one in the developed world can achieve nirvana.
