personal development

Fresher Thoughts

Sorting through some old papers the other day, I came across a whole load of stuff I couldn’t even remember writing.

One piece of A4 paper had 17 thoughts/ideas written down from my Fresher year. I’m guessing they’re my own thoughts. I haven’t credited another source, but I don’t know why I wrote this and what it was for.

Nevertheless, I felt it would be fun to put this up on TheUniversityBlog, since these were clearly important to me at the time as a new student. Some of it reads a bit strangely now, although I’m sure it seemed amazing at the time. 🙂

If you recognise these points from somewhere else, please let me know. For now, I’ll take it that these thoughts came from my mind!

So here you are. Here’s my 17-point masterpiece, unedited, for all to see. What do you think?

17 Fresher Thoughts

Return to a piece of writing/art that you have previously experienced and note the differences and additional feelings that you notice in this return journey.
Fact and fiction collide and make no sense of each other. That is the perfect fusion.
There’s a lot to be said about Feng Shui. If all components are in place, the focus can run for longer. With enough stamina, it may be possible to fly.
Embrace change. People who don’t change eventually start to smell.
There is no ‘perfect’ moment. Pool your skills together, work as hard as possible, and hope for enough luck to fuse it all together.
Simply thinking it isn’t enough. Think it and respond!
Influence and inspiration are more powerful than you’ll ever imagine. Find yours and you will find yourself.
The smallest of things could be the start of something big. The biggest of things could be the gateway to a billion small things. Start collecting!
Five senses, infinite possibility.
If you can’t find the time to do it, you’re not busy enough.
Opinion alone is boring. Explore, learn, and understand.
Feel your best and you will do your best.
There is no point in being too stubborn. It will just bring out your negativity.
Working alone has its benefits. Teamwork has its benefits. Make both your priority and start making a difference.
Find your natural speed. Feel the adrenalin pumping and see how your natural speed is your own unique optimum speed. Any faster is slower. So start cruising!
Don’t automatically ridicule what you do not appreciate, relate to, or understand. Open yourself up to it instead.
All this opening up can be productive, but remember to keep your guard up. A guard is better than a block or a total breakdown in communication. Remember, you are guarding, not stopping.

I haven’t a clue who these were aimed at. Myself? Another person? Nobody in particular?

Whatever the case, I was happy to find the piece of A4 paper with these 17 thoughts on. A positive find.

Open Your Mind: Take A Different Route

When I’m feeling uninspired, I do the same thing differently. When I need help solving a problem, when I’m not in the mood to start important work, when I’ve got something on my mind, when I need a bit of mental stimulation, I do one thing.

I change direction. Literally.

photo by ChodHound

One of the most consistent and shockingly simple actions you can take to open your mind is to take a different route somewhere. Walk, drive, cycle…it doesn’t matter. Just go a different way. It’s simple, yet amazing.

Next time you want a mouthful of mind food, travel to campus a different way to usual. Go home along paths you’ve not explored before. Find another way of getting from A to B. Even if you change just a few steps off your normal route, do it! Make it count.

Plan a different route in advance if you like. You don’t need to be spontaneous. The purpose of changing direction is to see things differently. If you go the same way, every day, you’re unlikely to be inspired by the same old views and landmarks.

As soon as you vary the journey a little, you notice new things, you appreciate it differently, and you stop treating the commute as a necessary annoyance. Upon reaching your destination, you’re more likely to feel positive, alert, and ready to deal with whatever comes your way.

There are all sorts of variations on this:

Ride a bike instead of taking the bus. Changing mode of transport is just as effective;
Take the same route as usual, but look up instead of down at the pavement. Challenge yourself to spot things you hadn’t noticed before;
Make a point of studying a particular aspect of the route, like the distinguishing features on the front doors you pass, for instance;
Find three or four ways to get from A to B and never take the same route two days in a row;
Switch off your iPod. Listen to the world as you walk;
Switch on your iPod. Let the journey and the music be one. Listen to different types of music each day and see how it changes the way you feel;
Go further…walk the long way around to get somewhere. Leave more time and enjoy a leisurely walk off the beaten track. Who cares if you start off by walking away from your destination? You’ll get there in the end!

Stuff like looking at front doors may seem a bit strange, but it’s simply to help you think differently. You don’t have to have a reason for it. The exercise is to stimulate your mind in a way you hadn’t been stimulating it before.

This is probably the most effective exercise I do. In the past, when I’ve been feeling bogged down, angry, confused, stuck for ideas, uninspired, or anything negative, this has been the key back to wonder.

Which direction are you headed today?

The wrong people who are right for you

No matter how mild mannered you are, I’m sure there are people out there who you vehemently disagree with. You may keep it to yourself, but you’ll certainly ignore everything they say.

Also, no matter how positive you are about your life, I’m sure there are people out there who look like they live such an effortless life that it’s annoying. While you struggle, even slightly, there’s always someone else who looks like they’re having a better and more successful time than you.

photo by Ana_Fuji

We compare on a regular basis. And it’s not just objects and concepts. We compare ourselves to others and we compare our situation to others.

But the only person we really know is the person we live with 24/7. I know me. You know you. We can’t go further than that. At least, not until mind-reading is developed on a total scale. And I imagine that’ll bring the end of the world anyway, because we won’t like hearing what everyone else is thinking!

Of all the people you like, look up to, and respect, you probably do so because you agree with a lot of what they do. You may even see a bit of yourself in those people when you make comparisons. Perhaps you try to emulate them from time to time and don’t even notice yourself doing it. A lot of this is down to the contradiction known as the ‘comfort zone’. It makes you feel good in the short term and it doesn’t stretch you.

Who do you look to when trying to break out of that ‘comfort zone’?

What about the people you don’t gel with? What about those you disagree with? What about the ‘effortless’ people who don’t appear to try?

These people are sometimes the best characters to turn to when you want to improve your own circumstances. Here are four reasons why:

You need a challenge – If you only find people who tell you what you want to hear, you’re not doing anything to push yourself forward. Not everyone is like you. A person’s difference isn’t a weakness and it isn’t necessarily wrong. Sometimes it takes an opposing view to get you out of a rut or help you open up the bigger picture. You may still not agree after listening, but it should help challenge your own thought process and give you more scope in the long run.
Everyone has something worthwhile to say – However accomplished you are, you need to listen to other people. People from all backgrounds, cultures, viewpoints. A specialist in any subject/career, will get people on board who specialise in things that they don’t. And the most committed (and likely, successful) specialists will look to other specialists in their own field, to find new ideas and possibilities. They’ll come together to debate the future, to understand difficult concepts, and to uncover issues that they hadn’t considered themselves. A specialist in the same field may be the competition, but that’s likely to mean what they say is more worthwhile, not less. A real genius doesn’t pretend to know everything.
The ‘effortless’ people try harder than you think – There’s no such thing as ‘overnight success’. Perhaps a random lottery win or one-in-a-million fluke. For most people, success happened overnight after many months, if not years, of work. You’ll see one side to these people, but unless you become that person (hint: you won’t), you can’t fully grasp the difficulties they face. And I bet some of their challenges are over issues that don’t phase you one bit. Read the autobiographies of successful people you think have it so good and you’ll probably be surprised at what they’ve had to face.
People you disagree with can often provide valuable advice – I’ve already mentioned above that we’re all unique. We have opinions and viewpoints and they make us who we are. When someone suggests something that sounds wrong, ask yourself why it sounds wrong and question how bad things would be if you went down that route. Would it truly be the end of the world? Does your thought process suddenly uncover a problem that you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise? Before you dismiss so-called ‘bad’ advice, let it make an impact on you so you have good reason to dismiss it. You may realise there’s more in the advice than you first thought.

If you’re surrounded by people who agree with everything you say and do, it’s easy to lose touch with reality. The ‘comfort zone’ leads you down a dangerous path, which ends up being rather less comfortable than you’d imagined.

So don’t ignore a critic. Faced with a critic, you’ll either learn about flaws that will help you improve, or you’ll have the energy and knowledge to prove them wrong.

“Most leaders will receive criticism at some point or another. The strength of their leadership is often how they respond to that criticism.”

[Jackie Cameron]

Who has helped you push through difficulty, despite differences?

photo by FilmNut

Change, Take Action, Forge Ideas, and Drive

I hope you enjoyed my recent six-part series on Time. However, the path to success in your studies – and beyond – goes further than effective time management.

Life is unpredictable. Whether or not you plan into the future, you still want to exercise control over that future. However, an unexpected event can dramatically alter the course of your life, whether you like it or not. A change in popular trends, a personal tragedy, an oversight with timely consequences…anything can reshape what’s going on and thrust you in a different place to where you’d expected. And where you’d calculated. And which you saw with total certainty until now.

So what’s the point in being so rigid? Yes, planning is necessary for success…

But so is accepting change.

You may even change yourself. Scott Young mentions on his site that he’s stopped setting long-term goals, because everyone changes so much so quickly. If you read what he says, you’ll understand why one of the craziest job interview questions is, “Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?”

Manage time effectively by initially narrowing your scope, not widening it. Long-term goals are one thing, but they should be based on general ideas. To achieve those goals, you need to see in smaller chunks of time.

University is definitely a time of massive change to you. Even a long-term childhood passion can fade away, in place of an even bigger passion. If you don’t have a passion, it may start developing while you’re an undergraduate. It’s all to play for.

The best way to focus on the need for change is to review on a regular basis. Review your short-term plans, long-term goals (if you have any right now), and all your personal passions. Without noticing, you may find that what you held dear last year now leaves you cold.

Once you accept change with open arms, the next thing to do is to *take action*.

You could have the best idea in the world since the dawn of time. But if you don’t take action to process that idea until it becomes reality, you might as well have not come up with the idea in the first place.

Ideas are funny things. When you accept change and take action, you still need to go further. Harvard Business posted an interesting piece a few days back, about structuring experiments for success. One striking piece of advice is:

“Executives and university administrators should stop trying to predict the success of very early ideas, instead they need to be sure they have enough of them and that their pool of ideas is diverse.”

The suggestion shouldn’t be limited to executives and administrators; I think it’s sound advice, whoever you are.

It’s like when I write. If I only had a single idea, I wouldn’t last long before running out of steam. I have a wide range of post ideas on the go at all times. I write all sorts of notes and even full drafts of posts that, in the end, don’t go anywhere. I’ll keep them for when it makes sense to bring them out again, but that’s why ideas are so great. The more you feel for ideas, map out your thoughts and write about all your little lightbulb moments, the better. Be aware of your ideas at all times to give yourself the best chance of developing.

So far, so positive. Yet even with a huge list of amazing ideas, you still can’t control everything about your future. Luckily, you are the very person who can drive it.

That’s the next step. You’re willing to change, you want to take action, you have ideas. Now drive!

The poet, Philip Larkin, wrote these words:

“And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.”

[From Continuing to Live (1954)]

There is so much calling out for your attention, but it’s up to you to filter until you’re left with what you need to succeed. This is where the big picture really comes into play. Your life doesn’t roll down a single track and you’re bound to have loads of responsibilities, interests, mates, and so on that you want to make a big part of your existence.

Armed with the want to change, a readiness for action, ideas and drive, your priorities should be crystal clear. With such clarity, you’ll have more time to enjoy.

So if you ever find yourself at a loss, without a structure, lacking a goal, or lacking control, it’s time to let go of some of the junk cluttering your life. It may have seemed important a while back, but when you focus on too many things to cope, you might as well not focus on anything at all.