Learned helplessness to prioritization
Failure in the growth phase could lead you to learn helplessness. It’s a belief that your efforts do not matter. Whatever you do is either bound by luck or you were just not made for it.
It could manifest as lacking confidence in goals. With some people, I observed a sense of not doing things because of helplessness due to some past experiences. One classical example I find interesting is being mathematically challenged in college due to some past experiences and trauma with the subject. On the other hand, there is another behavior associated with helplessness. I had (and have to a certain extent) a habit of jumping at each and every opportunity. Pursuing every task. This could appear due to being excessively motivated, but this is helplessness in disguise. There is a difference between working hard and working hard towards every opportunity. The smokescreen of putting efforts in seems counterintuitive to being helpless.
I find a rather healthy approach—essentialism. I would prefer to have confidence in the opportunities that I am going to pick up. Being choosy about what to do and what not to do.
I used to jump on each and every opportunity I used to get for the second, third, fourth, and some portion of the fifth year. In the first year, I was all hyped up about startups. I had internalized zuck to start working on my startup in the first year and then drop out eventually. It was mostly because of the hype associated with it. In the end, I screwed academics, not to mention the startup, which never took off. I still remember a friend of mine justifying me getting out of the startup club because I don’t have the required skill. Even though I did not internalize the reasoning, I ended up quitting. I now understand the importance of questioning your actions. Even in my fifth year, I had the same reasoning for choosing a job over a startup.
Anyway, this led me to develop a sense of helplessness about my academic abilities. For the third and fourth years, I went head-on with each and every opportunity I got. Always doing courses, doing internships, attending all talks and workshops, and working on getting the next big thing. I did end up scoring straight As, getting fancy internships and useful tech skills, I regret the motivation behind doing so. I wasted many of those opportunities because I was not able to prioritize between impactful and not-so-impactful goals. I could not prioritize between doing something to its full extent and saying no to less important things. For example, I took around 15 full courses on Coursera. Most of them are very niche and are pretty much useless unless I want to be a dev-ops guy at Google. On the other hand, I did not spend more than an hour on my foreign exchange application, which I believe was a very important opportunity. At some point, I was working on three internships simultaneously because I did not want to choose between a research intern, an SDE intern, and a fancy crypto/blockchain intern.
Organized chaos — prioritizing in unknown
I first heard about this term during my stay at Optiver. I find it pretty interesting. Life is all good when you have a plan. You could prioritize and choose only the best outcome, and so on. But how do you deal with uncertainty? What do you do when you don’t know what you want? What do you do when you don’t know the possibilities and challenges of the future? Organized chaos suggested having a plan with as specific as possible a detailed goal. Create a period of organized chaos. For example, if you have a big project, break it into small milestones, be very detailed while specifying them, and then go bananas in between. Explore everything within the boundaries you have set. Have chaos in a very organized and structured way. In the scope of previous discussions, let’s say I have a milestone—say, I want to improve my strength. I find running a good proxy for strength. I plan to run a half-marathon (21 km) in 4 months. On day 1, I could barely run 2 km without collapsing. I set up my milestones at 5, 10, 12, 15, 18, and 20 km, distributed over 4 months. Within the milestones, I kept the freedom to explore all the tips, hacks, and tricks I found on Reddit and YouTube. Those gel insoles, which could help you run for a longer duration? Try them. Does having a pre-workout shake help? Sure, try it. BCCA tablets? Why not. Some of them worked, but most did not. I am at the 10 km mark since I started 25 days ago. More to go.
Experimenting with a ton of stuff while not diverting from the goal was my takeaway from organized chaos. I learn a lot from chaos, but it is very easy for me to get diverted into something way away from the original aim. In this aspect, organized chaos helped me the most. My earlier approach would have easily led me to the hellhole of researching niche supplements for the body and not running after one or two weeks after getting overwhelmed with information.
In the end, I am currently obsessed with working on my past mistakes and burdens, which I am carrying over, knowingly or unknowingly. The inability to prioritize was one of the big flaws I had (and still have). Researching, talking to psychiatrists, and reading on this topic immensely changed my perspective. If you want to read more, you could try the following books:
The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, Essentialism by Greg McKeown, Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, and the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.
