flickerfade.org

but you’re still friends. that’s the beauty of it. motives are so hard to determine. even my own motives.

lots of non-academic things really count. believe in yourself and absorb the world, don’t just memorize.

Last year, a graduate student of [psychology professor Martin] Seligman’s named Angela Duckworth published with Seligman a research paper that demonstrated a guiding principle of these charter schools: in many situations, attitude is just as important as ability. Duckworth studied 164 eighth-grade students in Philadelphia, tracking each child’s I.Q. as well as his or her score on a test that measured self-discipline and then correlating those two numbers with the student’s G.P.A. Surprisingly, she found that the self-discipline scores were a more accurate predictor of G.P.A. than the I.Q. scores by a factor of two. Duckworth’s paper connects with a new wave of research being done around the country showing that “noncognitive” abilities like self-control, adaptability, patience and openness — the kinds of qualities that middle-class parents pass on to their children every day, in all kinds of subtle and indirect ways — have a huge and measurable impact on a child’s future success.

–Paul Tough in New York Times Magazine, November 26, 2006.

that’s not even the big point in the article, but i thought it was interesting.

if you really must know, sometimes i do worry, but i have learned to quickly suppress that instinct (say, within an hour) so that i get shit done instead of being paralyzed.

i did just worry about three hours ago for about one hour, because honestly i am not a top medical school applicant. i am a good one, just not a top one. i need to distinguish myself with essays and attitude and research and maturity and so on. but hey, the worst they’ll say is no. i realised that as i watched french football, and then everything was okay, and then i churned out three essays. take that, bub.

sometimes, writer’s block is easily confused with laziness. luckily, (three days later haha) i have beaten that affliction. i know i can do it, and i will.