“Trying hard is not always enough” one of the commonest phrases we might have come across as a student, even though most of us agree to this phrase but had we ever given this a second thought, or to think through what it might be referring to. When we fail in an exam who exactly is to blame at, is it the teachers, our environment, our own self; our habits or patterns we follow each day, or the limitation we are assigned with at birth (or in simpler words how dumb we genetically are).
Before i even present any of my opinions, i would like to know what do you think it takes to succeed academically? As far as i can think, it’s either a “natural ability” or “efforts” which mostly determines your success. There may also be other determinants as well which we will talk about a little later.
See having a natural ability means an innate aptitude or skill that one possesses in a particular area without needing an extensive training or practice. It’s like having a head start in a specific field—whether it’s art, music, sports, or academics. On the other hand “efforts” simply boils down to a practice or conscious work we put in order to get good at a certain thing or excel in it.
However in any such case there’s no sure-shot guarantee that you’ll succeed as there’s always some other nuanced factors into the play which can make things totally different or opposite, such as luck, inclination, environment, situations, and available resources that one has. See if someone is natural at something but is dead ass lazy or has no interest or drive to achieve in that area then its practically useless to have that kind of natural talent.
In the same way if someone is not natural enough at something but has a keen interest towards it, they can definitely at some point outgrow that natural guy. There might even be a case where you’re a natural, as well as you are equally interested in putting the efforts, but you have a really bad situation at home or might be struggling physically, mentally, or even financially. In such a case there isn’t much you can do from your side.
There can be other hundreds of combinations which can be made from such factors which hold the same potential to withdraw you from the success you’re looking for, but if we look at things generally or on most of the times they often are the same or similar for most of us i.e. we have average drive, environment, situations, and resources.
And just like a natural ability never guarantees that you will not be lazy, in the same way, efforts can’t teach you everything. The better thing to do instead is to just focus and be more conscious towards the task at hand, even though you’re not natural or the fact not everything can be learnt even with efforts, the simplest thing would be to put in the efforts anyway.
Generally it’s seen that we have a much wider and inclusive definition of efforts that we just throw whatever we invest our time in as a part of “effort”, scheduling tasks or setting up a daily schedule for hours/days for a exam scheduled next week, or preparing those aesthetics notes that even we will never care about except the fact they might be a good snap material, should all these things really be termed as efforts?
Although i do not have any exact percentage with me right now, but what i’ve seen as a student that majority of the aspirants are just preparing passively, they are more like involved but not actually indulged into the preparation. Whatever the reason might be, be it societal pressure, drive they have (or don’t have), or how much they are pre-occupied physically or mentally with things around them, or the distractions they have throughout the day, we must come out of that autopilot phase towards a more intentional approach about what actually is going on with us.
We just repeat the same process everyday that if often ends up becoming a routine task for us, and routine tasks never really make a difference, unless the routine task is to actively monitor or strategize after your core needs (or academic success in our case).
In many such studies it has been found that even though natural ability mostly comprise of genetic influence it also has influence of other elements like the environment we were brought up with or friends we had as kids, or the efforts we had putted in, in unison they all make a skill natural to us, in an another study done on heritability of IQ it was found that genetic factors accounts for as close as 57% of cognitive function variability1.
There’s often an overlap between genetics and environment which means it is not always an easy feat to recognize whether a skill is natural in someone or something which they’ve acquired from their environment and in what percentages, let’s take this for example, suppose your father was a great mathematician, and when you were born it would’ve been expected from you, that you would inherit the same math skills as your father, however could you really differentiate whether its the genes that made you naturally good at maths or was it because you were nurtured in an environment with a mathematician father from the day 1.
And even if you’re not genetically gifted, or with whatever % you and I may have gotten as a genetic predisposition from our parents we can at least work on that first. Nobody really wants to accept they haven’t tried their best, so before anything be someone to acknowledge that it might be a fault on our part, and that even if efforts can compensate to a certain extent, that certain extent is never reached by most of us, and which should be our primary goal.
Before i put an end to this i think if you’re midway into something or struggling to get through the other side or you’re someone who has academic pursuits or other larger goals in mind, you can start by taking things more intentionally, one other way to do this is by having a way to interrupt, intervene, review, amend, and strategize every now and then, ensuring you are consciously engaged into that particular task, only then you might have a chance to make a difference.
CALL TO ACTION
The minority ones who are acing the game might not necessarily be any geniuses or more intelligent but rather they are more intentional, driven, or someone more vigilant towards their priorities than you. Following are the list of tasks you may want to try after you’re done reading this post:
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Have a reflection checklist, set of questions you might want to ask yourself at the end of the day.
- here are some questions you may ask yourself: “Should I really count this as a day”, “Am I satisfied with my today’s efforts”, “Could it be done any better”, or “Did this day moved me any closer to my goals”.
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Have a nice long scheduled breaks (for an hour or two) maybe once or twice a week from everything and just think through your decisions and plan accordingly in that period.
- example: what went wrong, what should be done, how could it be improved further, and where i fell short.
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Have a system or process to minimize the friction as much as you possibly can so that it will be easier on you to start or continue a task, or to just help you in building discipline and consistency.
- example: a habit of doing revisions right after you watch/take a lecture, keep your laptop or devices charged before you study, organize your books or notes somewhere you can always have a access, and following a daily schedule.
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Automate, in addition to the above points have a way to automate tasks so you have little to no cognitive load.
- example: Setup most important tasks as blocks in the calendar (use google calendar) and add recurring reminders for them including specific days or time of the day (as per your specific requirements).
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Structured deliberate practice, although it will not always be feasible but whenever you have the opportunity be someone who has trained on multiple terrains.
- example: Try new approaches to understand or perfect the same knowledge, look for ways how the same thing can be asked differently in the examination, and do beyond the needful.
April 18th, 2024 was the actual date when i got the idea to write this topic.