Play The Game, But Don't Let It Play You

Life cannot be boiled down to and merely revolve around the game of school, and therefore should not be treated as such. I look at life from a gamified lens. Life is one big game, but if you carefully examine what we call life, it is a concoction of countless different games, which you have to conquer. School is just one of many games, albeit an important one. The impact school has on our lives shouldn't be overlooked, due to the ripple effect it has on other aspects of life. Nonetheless, just like how school should not be disregarded, neither should everything else which is non-school related.

My series of publications has been dedicated to illustrating how the game works and how to play it. This last entry however, is different. This last entry is dedicated to telling you to maintain a certain distance between yourself and this game, so you don’t over-immerse yourself to the point where it consumes you. Essentially, you want to avoid having your personality oriented around school and it being the only thing you do while neglecting everything else. Regardless of whatever you do or how successful of a student you become, do not surrender to the system. A perfect example of individuals who do surrender to the system are those people who do nothing but school-related tasks. They don't reach the level of success in the future that you would expect, because they have solely focused on transcending themselves academically. They did not carry the same attitude when it came to other significant aspects of life, and as a result, they saw minimal improvements in those fields. They were concentrating on bettering themselves on paper, but not as individuals.

School is irrefutably an important and large phase of our lives, which contributes heavily to unfolding many different closed paths and locked opportunities in our lives. School, as a stand-alone, unaccompanied by anything else, is simply not enough if you crave success. Like I said previously, school won’t guarantee your success, but it sure helps. School, along with the way you conduct yourself outside of school, your habits and way of thinking, will dictate your level of success, and that’s what this chapter will emphasize. As much as I’ve encouraged you to direct your personal focus on school, you do not want to make it the focal point and dismiss everything else life has to offer. Make school one of your own main priorities, but not the only priority.


Try Different Things So You Know What To Do/Keep Learning

The reality is, school oversaturates our minds with such a large quantity of information, which we eventually forget due to the limited amount of real-life implications. A lot of what we learn is inapplicable to real-life scenarios, and without practising it recurrently, we forget what we learned. After a course is finished, a lot of what we learned is forgotten but a lot of information is also trapped at the back of our minds. Until we are exposed to that content again, we are unable to remember. However, a lot of content taught in school is exclusive to school due to its limited number of real-life applications and as a result, we are only exposed to that content the following school year. The decay theory of forgetting in psychology proposes that with the passage of time, and the greater the passage is, the more we forget. You probably won’t forget something you studied for yesterday, but do you remember the content you covered in a course a month ago? 2 months ago? Last semester?

What we learn in school is education. If you want to get ahead of the pack, use the time you have at home and advance your knowledge. The distinction between the two is key. Education consists of the things we learn in school, which is taught in a systematic way. Knowledge is the general facts we know as a result of our experiences.

Learning, when done independently, can be enjoyable when you do it of your own accord and without the pressure of testing. In order to make learning an enjoyable process for yourself, the first and most obvious step is to learn about things that captivate you. This could be about business, human psychology, designing etc. When you learn about something that genuinely interests you, you are more inclined to: a) want to actually learn it, and b) enjoy the process of learning it. The second way to make learning more enjoyable is not to overload your mind with information. Take your time with it and learn in healthy doses. If you try to learn so much in a short duration of time, you’ll burn out. The goal is to remain consistent over a prolonged period of time. Try to also implement learning into your schedule and balance it with the other things occurring in your life.

The main purpose of obtaining more knowledge is so that you concurrently gain more experience, exposure to different things, and develop employable skills, assuming you apply what you know. There are multiple benefits to this. Firstly, you’re broadening your range of knowledge and experience. In the education system, performing poorly in one semester can dictate whether we are admitted to a university or not. However, real life does not operate that way. As you slowly introduce yourself to different things and continue applying your knowledge, you will inevitably make mistakes, but the difference is, you will have the chance to learn from them, without being penalized, if you make these mistakes in the early stages of your life. These mistakes will be the building blocks of your success if you are successful in not replicating them in the future. One of the best things you can do at a young age is develop vital skills. These skills act as an instrument to not only improve yourself but supply you with access to more opportunities.