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I didn’t think this phrase could somehow motivate me. Initially, hearing this adage was a big red warning sign that said “Do not cram all 4 modules in one night before your trials”. Pessimistically, the only other thing I took from this was that there were a lot (in fact, felt like too much) things to study. This demotivated me, which is a common issue across the whole HSC cohort.
When it feels like every sense of your self worth is tied to a simple number, how could you not procrastinate? It is easy to be scared, and consequently grow immobile. Anxious, even. How can we motivate ourselves, even when it gets hard, and do it for long periods of time?
1. What comes first, motivation, or action?
This is the new “did the chicken come first, or the egg” question. I asked a lot of people, and they agreed that we have to be motivated, then the action follows. This is however, the wrong way around.
What is it that is going to motivate us?
I stuck a big ATAR goal on my desk…
I made a countdown timer until HSC…
I thought about how horrible my life would be if I didn’t do well for an exam…
The common factor here was that I did anything but doing what I needed to (the action), and instead tried to spawn some motivation from… somewhere, which wasted a good chunk of my time.
Our mind can be compared to the weather. It changes everyday, subtly, to very drastic changes. It may be true that on those sunny days, your mind will go and do heaps of work, and you’ll love the productivity it gives! But for those more common rainy days (exacerbated by the impending exams), your mind is not as capable of bringing up motivation. This is the enemy of habit formation, and consequently breeds dissatisfaction, which worsens your mental game even more.
That’s why it’s better to reframe your thinking of motivation from this:
MOTIVATION —> ACTION —> MORE MOTIVATION
To this:
ACTION —> MOTIVATION —> MORE MOTIVATION
If you start off with the action, then no matter how turbulent your mind may be, it always has a way to kickstart the motivation generating process. However, if you start with motivation first, then you actually getting the work done is akin to a lotto. Sometimes you win, but most of the time you’re cashing out nothing!
2. Consistency is king
This point is reiterated often in these blogs, but it is so critical that you form consistent habits that you are able to stick to. What I found worked for me was ‘habit stacking’. Essentially, put the good habits you have side-by-side, so that when you do the first one (which has a high completion rate), you are more motivated to do the following one. For example, I knew that I passed by a library every time I commuted back home. I devised a routine where I’d visit the library on select days of the week (and treated myself to food, to sweeten the deal). After I’ve had my food and visited the library, I would go do a past paper, or mark the previous one I’ve had. This allowed me to go through more past papers than my peers, which enabled my math grade to go up a lot!
It goes without saying, but you do need to take care of the essentials of your body (food, exercise, sleep) in order to accumulate good habits. If you don’t take care of these essentials, your body will find a time for you to take care of it, through hunger pangs, fatigue and sickness!
3. Can you really control your ATAR?
A large part of me overcoming the battle with the stress of HSC is realising that I can’t control everything. There is a lovely narrative where students believe they can 100% control every aspect of their ATAR. They can somehow rally all the students in their cohort to do well so the scaling works out, and also never miss a beat in their past paper revisions, and also come out on top for every single exam. It is a good illusion, because we would rather be 100% sure of something, rather than be unsure whether we can control our ATAR fully or not. However, this whole ‘ I can control everything’ idea is untrue, and does more damage than any good it can provide.
The first issue is that it is impossible for you to control your cohort’s performance. If they’re good one year, they’re good, but if they’re bad, they’re going to be bad. There is absolutely nothing you can do to meaningfully change this. Along with this point, there is also no guarantee you can rank first for every exam. Because you can’t choose your classmates, it could be that there is an extremely talented, top 0.01% student that you can never beat. Scaling is out of your control.
What about our ATARs? Scaling and cohort performance influences our ATARs, so we can’t fully control it already. Believing you can control everything about it will destroy your mental health, because rainy days exist, and they will occur, without warning nor reason. You could be sick on an important tutor lesson, or miss out on a few past papers because of a relative’s passing. Being okay with not being in control of everything leaves you with a lot more mental bandwidth. Most importantly, it doesn’t knock down your motivation again and again. Paradoxically, I found myself most motivated when I knew it was okay to not do well. As long as I tried my best with what I could control, that was a job well done for me.
“You can’t control the cards you’re dealt, just how you play the hand.”
- Randy Pausch
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