Steve Pavlina is a human like the rest of us and only has a limited number of good ideas. One of those is the simple, obvious but often overlooked one that life is easier if you are disciplined and organised about how you go about it. This is something we all know at some level. Paying off your credit card on time is cheaper than forgetting it. Doing a shopping list before you go to the shop minimises the time you spend in it and maximises the usefulness of what you end up leaving with. Steve is particularly creative at coming up with great examples of this general principle and producing highly readable blog posts from them. A good one is his description of how he became a straight A student.
When he was at school he resolved to get an A for every assignment. He went about this logically and methodically. He did a post mortem on every submission that didn't make the grade he was after, never settling for less than the top mark. He sought help and support from teachers. He devised strategies that enabled him to avoid errors. He never settled for less than the top result.
It is an impressive read. He was successful in his endeavours and discovered that in fact it was less work to operate in this way. He developed the right habits and they led to success with a lot less effort than the less focused people who left everything to the last minute and had to cope both with the work itself and the stress induced by their chaotic working patterns. It sounds a little bit like he is looking back with rose tinted spectacles - he surely can't have found it quite that effortless - but it is a good pattern for avoiding stress in life in general.
I can't claim to have been as successful as Steve but I am well aware that times in my life when I have been better organised have been a lot happier than I have let things slide. It is certainly true that the sooner you learn something the more benefit you get out of it. I remember when I was doing my science degree at one point we were told that we would now have to report our work in the format and at the standard of published research papers. I hit on the idea of reading some papers in the area we were working on to get a feel for how it was done. It was a good idea - an example is a lot easier to work from than the abstract guidelines we had been given.
I was so pleased with this idea that I rehearsed in my head how I would explain my cleverness to people. I got this off pat in fact, with different versions suitable for parents and family and for people back home who weren't scientifically inclined along with more cynical and world wise explanations for more direct peers. The only thing was I never actually got around to putting the idea into practice. In those pre-internet days I would have had to have gone to the library to read papers and somehow I never got around to actually finding the time. So unlike Steve I didn't get the full marks available.
Looking back on it, I ended up acquiring the skills of reading and writing scientific papers not too long afterwards anyway. Had I learnt them earlier I would probably have done better sooner in my career. The six hours or so that it would probably have taken would have paid dividends. I had a great social life as a student, so I imagine I enjoyed myself doing whatever else it was that I did instead. But I have a feeling I would have enjoyed the benefits of reading those papers just then more.
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2013/10/how-to-earn-straight-as/
Photo credit: Tahmid Munaz™ via photopin cc
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