06.09.13
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Getting a First Class: Consistency vs Sprinting on Impulse

Now this could be the singular most important post to read for anyone aiming to achieve academic success. In actual fact, this post might also apply in many aspects of life and the successes that one could enjoy. Should anyone ask for any piece of advice to getting good grades, the answer that I would give them is to be consistent. It’s that simple.

Think about the typical undergraduate study pattern. The first week of school and everything is so nice. Classes are relaxed. There’s no tutorials. We are all busy catching up after the holidays. We sit through the first lecture of each module expecting it to be some introduction where nothing concrete is taught and we are just there to have a good relaxing start to the semester, which would probably become very difficult as the days progress anyway.

It’s week 2 and hey for NUS students, the tutorials only start in week 3. There’s still time to play and enjoy some fun. Week 3, it’s the first tutorial. What could go wrong if we don’t do these tutorials anyway. Soon it’s week 5, there’s a recess week after week 6 and after the recess week it’s the dreaded mid terms. Should we start now? And most people start to hit the books on a more serious note, trying to cram whatever was taught in the first 5 weeks.

The Exponential Cumulative Principle

The Cumulative Principle is simple math, really. As long as you do not clear a piece of work, it comes back to hound you. The work in week 1-4 accumulates and by week 5, you have 5 weeks of information to study. Truth? Except it’s not. What really happens is this:

The studies in week 1 are the foundation for you to understand the lecture in week 2. The studies in week 2 are the foundation for you to understand the lecture in week 3, and so on and so forth. By neglecting the first few weeks, we have effectively found ourselves in a situation where we do not understand what the lecturer is talking about in week 5, and we have wasted these 5 weeks of time. The Exponential Cumulative Principle simply means that in order to make up for such lost time, the effort required to re-learn everything in week 5 is not equal to 5 weeks of effort, but rather, it might be much more than that. Week 1 of effort might become 5 weeks of effort by week 5, week 2 might become 4 weeks of effort by week 5, and adding it up, by week 5 you need 15 weeks of effort just to catch up.

While the tortoise strolls on beyond the hare and finally wins the race.

How did he have so much time?

Sometimes we look at the students who have it all and we wonder, “How did he have so much time?”. How did he manage to study, learn and do those crazy CCAs and activities that boost his resume up a notch? The answer is just that we are catching up and spending more effort due to the Exponential Cumulative Principle when we could have just been consistent and only spend 5 weeks of effort to achieve the same effect. Then we will have so much more time to do other things too.

Now we may argue, we get to spend more time with friends and enjoy ourselves during the initial 5 weeks; surely that counts for something? Yeah I guess, but if what you really want is the best of both worlds then at one point there’s got to be a balance. You could still consistently have time for friends; just that it is not so lopsided that the time spent on friends is exponentially decreasing as you spend almost all your time with friends in week 1. It’s better to be consistent.

Not to mention its impossible to have 15 weeks of effort in 1 week just to do catching up. Your grades will definitely suffer; unless you are some super smart dude to begin with, and if so you probably don’t need to read this post.

Consistency

Hence the answer to many things in life is consistency, and make it so consistent that it becomes a habit. Here’s what I do in my typical semester.

I attend the lectures and really try my best to pay attention. I try to scribble notes; on hindsight, if I had learnt about mindmapping earlier then I would have been more effective. I do the tutorials that I am required to do so that the tutorial session will be effective (never mind the possibility of inefficient tutors, which is a real threat). And I make use of the forums in school to ask questions if I could not understand the tutor. And I contribute back to other’s queries. Funny how the way the universe works; when you give, you gain so much more in return.

At the end of any week, I spend half a day compiling my own notes (you could do it in mindmap form) from the lecture notes provided. I bring these notes wherever I go in school. By compiling my own notes, I (1) actually did my revision and found parts which I didn’t understand, following which I made sure I found out the answer and (2) build my foundation such that when I don’t understand material in the subsequent weeks, I could look at my own notes so that I can catch up. And if you understand the Buzan’s lesson on building long term memory (which I will have to write another post on), compiling my own notes help in a bit to improve my learning efficiency.

Hence I did not bring any material unquestioned into the next week, ensuring that I would not need to put in twice the effort to reach the same state in subsequent weeks.

That’s all really. The consistency actually helped to make sure exams were easier. I just didn’t need to spent more time as compared to others because I had invested my time earlier.

Consistency will help in other ways other than academic success as well. Consistency at work ensures that work do not pile up and overwhelm you a few weeks later. Consistency increases your credibility, improves your standing etc.

Now that you have learnt the single secret to academic success, what will you be doing?

06.05.13
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Meeting and Minutes

Something which schools did not teach but are vital for success in both business and non-business worlds, which is organising a meeting and writing minutes. Now, not every company requires minutes for their meetings but that does not mean that minute writing is not relevant. There are many situations in which minute writing skills would come in useful.

Now, most of the times we realize we sit in a long meeting and weeks later, we have no recollection of what was exactly discussed at the meeting. This made the meeting rather unproductive. We have no idea what transpired and what decision did it lead to. As such we forgot what is required of us to do or we couldn’t grasp the rationale and hence submit sub-standard work.

If we are able to acquire some skills in minute writing, we might be able to capture pertinent points accurately and still be able to participate in the conversation. Weeks later, we are still sure of what was discussed and hence we are able to contribute even better in the future. Minute writing might become a method of taking notes.

Should you be working in a company where minutes is required to be recorded, minute writing skills would ensure you never miss the crux of the issues and the decisions that follow. You are also able to better advise members on their action items. You will be able to send in your minutes early, ensuring that everyone has ample time to kick start their follow up actions.

I have found an e book through the e book stores on minute writing. It’s titled “Taking Minutes of Meetings” by Joanna Gutmann. I will be reading the book and recording the important points down so that I can apply it. I have started to fill the role of a secretary at a few meetings and this skill would serve me well by making me more effective and finally more efficient as I waste less time writing the minutes after the meeting. I will be sharing these skills here on my blog when the time comes!

05.26.13
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Applying what you have learnt

We had over a decade of formalised education aimed to teach us skills in linguistics, mathematics, sciences, humanities etc, yet we have yet to truly learn the lessons that can help us as a person. Such information comes from a variety of places, for example, experience shared by a senior, words from a self-help book etc. While we know where exactly to learn some soft skills and raise our personal effectiveness, it is also important to actively use them.

After being taught on how to give effective presentations, do you still go back to the old style of presentations where you have words plastered all over the slides, causing the viewers to read actively and listen passively? After being taught a new word, do you try to use it more often or relegate it to the back of your mind? After learning how to draw an effective mind-map that can assist in your learning, do you use it or leave it to rust (figuratively)?

Mindmaps are something that I have been toying with for a very long time. My first experience of a real mindmap comes from Tony Buzan’s book titled “Mind Maps at work”. However I have failed to utilise my new found knowledge to learn newer things. I have adapted the mind map in its simplest form – a map, but I did not practice the art and science of the mind map, which consists of rules like colours, a single word on each branch etc. This caused my mind maps to be in a single colour – black. And not to mention, boring.

With this new book that I am reading titled “How to achieve your potential and enjoy life”, I have tried to make a real mind map this time. Incidentally, the book was a gift during a course on Tony Buzan’s 5 learning steps, which actually taught and allowed me to revise on the concepts of how to draw a real mind map. I am currently testing out the procedure and have since drawn 2 branches out of the possible 10 lessons from the book. To be honest it was indeed fulfilling and I felt that I was more able to grasp at the concepts than before.

Hence this blog-post. We all learn new things from many sources, but how often do we really do something about it? We learn and we know the path to success, but think about it: The wise man can show you the map, but you still have to walk it to reach the destination. Now that you know how to make it easier to reach the destination, employ the tool and use it. Then share it with other people so that they too can learn and harness these tools for their own personal success.

If you never applied the lessons, then the effort spent in learning have all gone to waste.

05.19.13
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Reward for positive behaviour

I mentioned that I had attended a course just two weeks ago on “Buzan’s 5 learning steps”. What I did not mention was that at the start there was an activity where we had to guess a message from what seemed to be many squares and some shaded parts.

Usually, I do not become enthusiastic about something until I had sufficiently warmed up, but strangely on that day, the moment I saw the hidden message, I just blurted it out to the speaker. I was pleasantly surprised afterwards when I was presented with a book titled “How to achieve your potential and enjoy life”.

It was a positive reinforcement that encouraged me to continue to participate to the best of my abilities. Through this episode, I also learnt that we will only get success when we do something.

I could have just kept mum and not say a thing. But that would mean someone else getting the prize, and given my character I might have continued to keep mum because that just ain’t me. However, the reward altered my behaviour and set my path differently. Once you realise you can do something, you will start to do it more often.

This is the same with success. Once you have tasted success, you will keep doing the things you have done over and over again, replicating the same success in your work, your personal life, your family etc.

The human spirit has limitless potential. Sometimes we just need to take that step forward and be the difference we would like to have to this world.

05.11.13
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Getting a First Class Honours: Surround Yourself with Positive People

Studies have shown (but I’m not going to start quoting them here)  that positivity leads to success. The mere thought that you can do something makes it possible for you to achieve your goal as opposed to the constant thought that the task is beyond your capabilites. Ever heard of the placebo effect? Patients getting cured by taking a non medicated pill that was told to them as the state of the art medicine for their illness. In actual fact what cured them was the belief that the pill could save them, and it did.

This just shows how powerful the mind is. I am a personal living testament of the power of positivity. There was a point in time where I started to see things in a positive light; nothing could put me down. It was the start of the best things in my academic life. I excelled in my tests, examinations and even presentations.

But what I did not have was positive friends, so I had to rely on my own innate positivity to bring out the best in me. Believe me, sometimes being positive makes you weird to other people, and annoying too when you try to rub off the positivity to other people.

So if we could surround ourselves with positive people, the barrier to being positive is significantly reduced as everyone is positive. Humans are social animals. It helps that your social circle agrees with how you think. It reinforces your concepts and you are more than likely to reach your goals.

Imagine that the professor had thrown in some last minute assignment and spoiled some of your plans. Your group could either say “this professor sucks. Totally spoiled our weekends”  vs “Alright let’s do what we can so that we can save what’s left of our weekends.”

Notice the difference?

To be honest, nobody really like whiners. Its fun to whine along to destress but if your whole life is about whining, sooner or later your friends will get sick of it.

You can choose to be positive or negative about a certain problem. You can choose to solve it or to blame others. But when you choose to be positive and accept the responsibility, chances are the work produced will be a higher standard than the whining group. And this leads to results and better grades. You will feel confident of yourself and enjoy your studies. You will be more positive and then this cycle continues. In this way, you can achieve academic success.

But if you surround yourself with negativity, you can either be strong minded and insist on self positivity, else humans usually succumb in order to fit in with the group. If you belong to the latter, you are not a leader in your own right and you won’t be those who achieve success.

The cycle of negativity also continues. Getting bad grades, deciding you are not cut out for something,  lose interest, getting more negative, worse grades.

So why would anyone choose negativity? It’s easier. The world is quite interesting. Only a few will achieve great success and they will enjoy the fruits that will make other people envious. But with great rewards comes great sacrifice. It does not make sense that success comes easily.

So choose positivity over negativity. When you surround yourself with a positive group, you will find it easier to stick to the goals you set and you have more chances of seeing it through to completion.

05.11.13
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Goal Setting

On Thursday, I attended a short one day course at the Defense Technology Tower B where I was exposed to Tony Buzan’s 5 learning steps. Close friends of mine would know that I had been reading up on quite a bit of Tony Buzan’s books, namely the ones on mindmap, memory enhancement and one called “Use your brain”. Hence the material covered was not entirely new to me. However, I still managed to learn something new and get re-inspired by what the speaker said. The day served as a good revision and a renewed attempt to try to pick up Mindmapping in Tony Buzan style.

There was something that the speaker said which resonated with me. It was something I had heard before, once in exactly the same manner, and the other in a different focus. He spoke about a study done on Stanford students and how only 5% of them actually set goals in their short to long term time frame. As they progressed, the study continued and eventually what they found out was that these 5% earned 95% of the total wealth of all the students.

The other version I heard just had a slight difference to the numbers. Top 3% earning 97% of the total wealth. Numbers aside, it served as a prominent reminder of how important goal setting and goal getting is. While I had kept general goals of my life so far, I have not attempted dictating to the micro level the kind of sub-goals I would like to achieve the over all goals.

Hence while I still had interest in mind-mapping, along with the still fresh lessons, I started work on my goal setting. It wasn’t easy, and I took quite long to decide on what I wanted to do in the first quarter. I had defined short term as a time period of 1 year and it had contained 4 quarters. I tried to give each quarter a structure so I could modify and add components as and when the need arises. For example, I cannot predict the type of books that I am going to read beyond Quarter 1 as there will be new and more interesting content that captures my imagination. Also, I cannot predict on which engineering study I should do. Hence I catered slots for book reading and a mini project each quarter.

Then I progressed on for the medium term goals which I set as a time period of 3 years. After writing some of my medium term goals, I realized how much they would have affected the short term goals, hence I had to go back to do some tweaking as and when necessary. I am sure that when I arrive at my long term goals, I will have to adjust my medium and short term goals accordingly.

The quote “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail” just strikes me as something very true. I could potentially waste my life away if I did not find time to plan and get together with myself. I need to allocate some alone time occasionally to recharge and re-plan my life. My work life is also in a mess because I did not sit down together with myself to plan what I wanted to do.

With the fresh new insights from the course, I will then set my mind to my goals and achieve them. In the process, I hope to become rich monetary, spiritually and in health.

05.05.13
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Learning from others

Throughout a huge bulk of your our lives, we have been schooled and taught by educational institutes set up by the government to teach us a thing or two about languages, sciences, math, humanities like literature and history etc. But after 6 years of primary school,  4 years of secondary school, 2 years of JC, and 4 years of university education,  we didn’t learn enough to propel ourselves ahead of the pack.

We have all come out in the same packaging: brand name schools,  good grades in the same subjects etc. We are able to handle the nature of our job, but it might not be effective. It might not be productive,  and productivity is the new keyword of our new economy. We are still not good leaders and managers, and we lack the clarity of thought and the maturity to understand others.

But this does not mean we cannot develop these skills that are required for us to differentiate from the rest of the pack. We can hone our leadership skills; we can develop good presentation techniques; we can learn mind mapping to see the bigger picture. Heck, I even tried learning about positivity and happiness in the workplace.

The main gist is,  we can learn from the lessons of those who had been before us. I used to read much fiction books in my schooling days and the frequency decreased with time.  Recently I picked up reading on my trusty tablet and I have never stopped buying e books with the intention of reading and learning the content inside. These books are written by those who had done it before us and achieved the success. Sometimes they took many years to refine a certain method of success, but who is to say that we cannot replicate the process? Who is to say we cannot learn it and start applying it successfully at age 27 as opposed to the author who might be in his late 40s when they perfected their art?

The next step would then be to learn and replicate it. Then, to pass it on to others and build your own successful team. The world out there is big. Why not be that difference you want to see in your society? Never stop learning.