Preparation so that even your nerves know it!!
Unless appearing for job interviews is routine to you, and you have failed or succeeded without knowing how, does it matter after all? Is an impulsive living the key to real happiness?
A child sent to school for the first time is taught by his parents about what the school can be like and what he is supposed to do there and how he should behave with people he interacts with in school. This process is gradual. Within 2–3 years it becomes a part of the child’s life and he enjoys school for the next 10 years. It becomes his routine, his discipline and without thinking of money or law or any such stuff, unconditionally the child gathers information and sets himself to design his future. The child is prepared!!
Success is not impulsive. It is a product of sustained effort with very limited distractions. It needs focus. Therefore after the scoping, we need preparation that most forget to do in the right way.
When I was doing my post graduation, I was thinking more concretely instead of abstracting. It was because I was trying to quote everything written in my books. As is the case in children, their initial preparation is through concrete learning, and it prepares them to build up to become abstract. As children learn voraciously, many adults start concrete too. We learn what is told followed by exploring the matter. After this we form neologisms through previous knowledge by discovering all the what, when, why, how and other such questions. An intelligent mind does both concrete and abstract preparation before actually producing an individual and authentic work with their ability to critically analyse other works too.
I am still lacking in the quality of critical thinking because of taking lightly the check list or procedure that is required to do so. For doing so, one needs to follow the monotonous part of procedural preparation, then, even if very slow, progress will happen in a few years time. One might crack difficult exams by rote learning but it gives only momentary success that which will leave us unprepared to take up our calibre to the next level, to become critical thinkers!!
If we cannot criticize, we are not experts in what we develop or produce.
Our work should be in our nerves and for that- PREPARE, always till we get it.
The end point is not a lucrative success (which might accompany) but an intellectual success which I think is a preference for my kind of personality. This was what I have been wanting for the last 20 years, and have almost reached, not without flaws though. This experience as a Community Medicine expert made me come up with the following few ways to actually prepare for success:
Practice- Sometimes practice has brilliant consequences. Never back off from this step. Every time an Anatomist dissects the human body, he comes up with new insights. He gets better in the process even if he finds nothing new.
Revise- Only applying what we learnt long time ago shall cause confusion without revision. We might forget the previous while trying to learn more. We need a background over which we can expand further on old information with adding new knowledge time and again.
Explore- Once our preliminary knowledge is consolidated, we can simply find new material. Collect and stack newspapers, books, articles, notes. Go through it for one to two hours every 3-7 days and make notes. This step will break the monotony and make our work interesting for preparation.
Ponder- At various intervals we can do scoping, imagining and shaping our thoughts about our subject of work. We may ponder about what we know exactly well and where is the lacuna. Or, we might imagine the platform where we can deliver our kind of work through mesmerising about all that might go wrong or go well for us.
Assess- Imagination triggers abstract thinking but if we do not assess where we are going with our kind of information, we might not contemplate a comprehensive judgment of our progress. Not quantity but quality matters in the assessment as we do have a lot of time if our focus and discipline remain intact. Without self assessment, most people are left with no questions, and may not even ask for guidance from coaches who have been there themselves.
Reason- Why and How are a set of difficult questions that always remain. As we grow old, they are the center of our focus because we have been prepared half way through and are able enough to reason and form our own theories to rely upon.
Explain and apply- After the stage of reasoning, we are prepared to discuss our expertise with the young and new and also those who might discuss with us by more brain storming sessions.
We are prepared and this is why we started in the first step. The steps mentioned should not necessarily happen in the written sequence, we can be explaining and reasoning simultaneously for instance and collecting new information also. These steps could be an intellectual progress prophecy.
Our work stays in our nerves and we are happy about it and content.
Prepare and go for an interview or perform most of the time with good intentions and never be impulsive about the work that matters to you the most.
