Trying to get perfect grades was making me fall behind.

Trying to get perfect grades was making me fall behind.

I'm only one semester into my engineering program, but I realized this right after acing a test. It should have felt like a win. Instead, it felt like I'd wasted my time. The skills I actually wanted - thinking deeply about the problems I cared about, or to be able to build the things that I imagined, were not on any of my exams.

Things I thought were mandatory started to become choices. A choice between spending another hour doing practice problems or building something I'd actually learn from. I started choosing the latter.

And not only was I finding my work more meaningful, I felt like I was building the person I wanted to be.

This shift wasn't easy. I lost the structure that I had known all my life. The familiar stress of study hard, do well in your classes, was replaced with ambiguity. All of a sudden, the direction was decided by me, not by a syllabus.

But that meant that even with my empty map, I had all the power - to do anything I want to do, and to achieve the things I care about. I now define my own success.

And I'll take that over practice problems any day.

Best, Ian