I've gone through a couple different phases in my life.
When I was a child, my academics were great but I was not too keen on other things that are important components of a well-balanced personality like having an active interest in music and sports or even more generally in building and maintaining good friendships. My early schooling took place in a society where popular people were those who were good at sports and generally presented themselves well. After this, I moved to India where family, friends, and academics were the most important things to master. Of these three things, as you can see from one of my previous blog posts, I was shown that academics was the most important to master and I slowly got to work mastering it in the Kristu Jyoti state syllabus school (ICSE, CBSE, and State syllabi being the prominent options for what syllabus we could choose arranged in higher to lower ranking)
When I was a high achiever, people often asked me about what motivates me.
I think that people are all relatively similar, so I'd like to paraphrase the words of a famous columnist, Mary Schmich, where she gives advice about How Not to Write in a 2003 column that I am presently reading in her book Even The Terrible Things Seem Beautiful To Me Now:
1. Do not try to write like Ernest Hemingway. Absolutely never try to write like Dave Barry. What works for them is apt to make you look foolish. On the other hand, feel free to do what one famous writer did early in her career, which is to type out pages of her favorite writer's writing to get a feeling for how he structured sentences. Or keep good writing handy - I particularly like poems for this purpose - and when your brain is locked, read for a while. Feeling other writers' words and rhythms can loosen up your own.
2. Do not wait for inspiration. You don't need inspiration to write. You need a deadline. If you write only when you're inspired, you'll have dust-free floors, a gleaming toilet, mounds of clean underwear - and a blank computer screen.
Oh, to be a high achiever again. Guess all I'll need to do is start doing me and setting deadlines for myself.
When I was a child, my academics were great but I was not too keen on other things that are important components of a well-balanced personality like having an active interest in music and sports or even more generally in building and maintaining good friendships. My early schooling took place in a society where popular people were those who were good at sports and generally presented themselves well. After this, I moved to India where family, friends, and academics were the most important things to master. Of these three things, as you can see from one of my previous blog posts, I was shown that academics was the most important to master and I slowly got to work mastering it in the Kristu Jyoti state syllabus school (ICSE, CBSE, and State syllabi being the prominent options for what syllabus we could choose arranged in higher to lower ranking)
When I was a high achiever, people often asked me about what motivates me.
I think that people are all relatively similar, so I'd like to paraphrase the words of a famous columnist, Mary Schmich, where she gives advice about How Not to Write in a 2003 column that I am presently reading in her book Even The Terrible Things Seem Beautiful To Me Now:
1. Do not try to write like Ernest Hemingway. Absolutely never try to write like Dave Barry. What works for them is apt to make you look foolish. On the other hand, feel free to do what one famous writer did early in her career, which is to type out pages of her favorite writer's writing to get a feeling for how he structured sentences. Or keep good writing handy - I particularly like poems for this purpose - and when your brain is locked, read for a while. Feeling other writers' words and rhythms can loosen up your own.
2. Do not wait for inspiration. You don't need inspiration to write. You need a deadline. If you write only when you're inspired, you'll have dust-free floors, a gleaming toilet, mounds of clean underwear - and a blank computer screen.
Oh, to be a high achiever again. Guess all I'll need to do is start doing me and setting deadlines for myself.
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