Five years ago, I would still have been in the first year of my Master’s at NITTTR Chandigarh. My day-to-day life there consisted of catching a bus from Kurali to ISBT 43 Chandigarh and then catching another bus to NITTTR. Before the lectures started, I would wait in the small department library.
Of the lectures I attended, the most motivating one was Signal Processing. I had no clue what was going on in the Wireless & Digital Communication lectures. Even though it became critical for me later, at the time, I had zero idea what was happening! Obviously, this was my daily routine before Covid-19.
Going through a lot of crests and troughs during my Master’s journey, things were always a little crazy for me personally, as I am hyper-aware of my surroundings. People like me sense changes in the environment very fast and sometimes over-sense them as well.
So, here is the first piece of advice I would pass on to my younger self: Start labeling and assigning a scale value from 1 to 10 for your reaction to any change you sense in your surroundings.
The idea here is not to put your senses to work for every small thing. Assigning a scale will help you identify the clear objective (ranging from 7 to 10) that you have to focus on, and distinguish it from the “noise” (1 to 6) which should be ignored. I learned this the hard way. Getting into a professional environment – like GreyB, where I recently learned that following your objective is important and everything else is just barely acceptable.
Secondly, never push aside other habits while focusing on one goal.
Before giving this advice, I want to say out loud: Yes, it gives you a “kick” to focus on the current goal and ignore everything else around you. In some conditions, it might even give you better results. I won’t deny I have been rewarded for doing this in life, but at what cost?
As soon as I stepped into professional life, I noticed that people expect the same spirit of focusing on a goal, but while maintaining other habits as well. Ignoring other habits soon becomes a roadblock to growth because people can’t connect with such a hyper-focused person. If you can’t connect with people, you can’t guide big teams.
By “other habits,” I mean going to the gym, watching at least one sport (probably Cricket if you live in India), having a decent amount of political knowledge, etc.
This is the second piece of advice I would like to give to myself. For now, I believe this advice would have carried me a long way five years ago, hahaha!
More next time!