Manage your expectations
#This post is part of my 30 days writing challenge.
In my final year of high school I scored 99.33% and I was content given the absolute minimal work I had put in, where my mother thought I would fail that year! However, once I realized that I missed 3 grades on math, I got angry and nervous because:
- It was something I was exceptional at and I loved it.
- I thought that I aced the exam so I got seriously annoyed when I did not.
So, I decided to make an appeal and see what’s going on. I went to check the paper and I was absolutely stunned because it turned out that:
- I have failed to answer the first question on the exam. For some reason, I did not see it.
- In the second question, I have arrived to an answer (x) . Then in the next step, I substituted X with Y by mistake.
Why? Because the day before, I didn’t study and then I started feeling guilty at midnight so I started cramming and I went to the test completely tired with a suboptimal brain.
Lesson learned:
- Results barely disappoint, Expectation does.
- Smartness and handwork are important but so are health and mindset.
- School was mostly a game of who understood better how to hack the system which could be fun but absolutely not useful to one’s learning and discovery.
As William Shakespeare stated:
Expectation is the root of all heartache
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