Can't keep up with college

(Forgive me loyal readers, I always intend to blog but my 3 month old leaves little time or energy for writing.  I promise I will try to be more consistent in the future.   Have a question?  Email me and I will answer.)


I just transferred into a new university and absolutely love it.  One problem though is I set some goals too high and it kills me a little bit when I can't reach them.  Before coming in I expected great grades, playing time in my sport, pledging a fraternity and a significant increase in my romantic life.  Since being here I've struggled with grades even though I study a lot, I had to fight hard to get a spot on the team, the pledge process is wearing me out, and haven't had much luck with the ladies.  Is there a strategy I can take to not set my standards so high so I don't build up the stress of not achieving what I can't do all the time?


The problem is not having high standards it is with viewing failure as a bad thing.  I was once asked the question "what would you do if you weren't afraid?"  What if you did not have to fear failing out of school, not getting PT on the team, not getting a position in the fraternity, getting rejected by women.  How much lighter would you feel if all of these things were still possible but if they happened they would not make you question yourself anymore?  

The goal for you is to begin to view failure as feedback.  For example when lifting weights we are often told to continue going until our muscles give out.  This tells us when we have reached our maximum.  In your case you are putting too much on your plate and setting unrealistic standards of achievement.  Then when your time gives out instead of using that information to lighten your load, you blame yourself.  Not fair, not smart.  

Accept that you are only a normal human with 24 hours in your day.  Try listing all the things you wish to do and then rank the items from most to least important.  Then you have to budget your time according to those priorities.  When you "fail" at a task ask yourself "how can I learn from this, how can I 'Fail Forward' and turn this experience into something I want to remember instead of something I feel ashamed of.  

With regard to your sport, instead of measuring your success by how much playing time you got or how well you played ask yourself how alive you felt every time you stepped on the field.  Did you allow yourself in each run that you got to be fully present and in the moment or did you think about trying to impress your coaches and teammates?  Define success as mindfulness, (being fully present in the moment) and you will play much better and enjoy the game more. 

With your fraternity stop focusing on getting a position and instead focus on creating memories.  Whether you stay in that fraternity for two more weeks or two more years the reason to join it is to enhance your college experience not to build your resume.  Every experience in pledge-ship both bad and good (and I had way more bad that good when I was a pledge) is hopefully going to be a memory that you will cherish.  

With class don't worry about your GPA, just try to get as mentally involved as you can in each class that you attend and in each project that you do.  Most of us spent college just jumping through hoops and trying to get grades and if any learning occurred it was a happy accident.  That attitude was a huge waste of my tuition money.  If you are fully present in class when you are in class whether you get a D or an A in the class it won't matter because you will have learned.  Your college GPA will not get you a good job your internships will and if you don't do any internships before you graduate you are really wasting your time.  

With regard to women, if your goal is just to hook up with as many girls as possible that is a great way to get a disease and a lot of regret.  If you want to meet the kind of girl that would be relationship material try becoming a curious conversationalist.  Strike up conversations with any person that seems interesting, regardless of whether or not you have any romantic interest in them.  When the people you are talking to realize that you have interest in them as a person and not just as a potential notch in your bed stand they will tend to have a more positive response and they may end up introducing you to your perfect match.  Or they may just be the other end of a single conversation you will never forget. 

Do you see the theme here?  You are putting so much pressure on yourself because you are surviving your life right now rather than living it.  I have a big sign in my office that says "BE HERE NOW"  to remind me to take a breath and savor the moments.  When we savor our life we may not have as much time for everything but we get far more out of each thing we do.   We stop seeing our activities in terms of success and failure and rather in terms of memories we wish to repeat and memories we wish to learn from.  No failure in that equation.  

Failed out, now what?!

(Lately I post very irregularly so you are going to want to follow the blog, on this site or on face book so you make sure you don't miss a posting)

Question:  Freshman year did not go so hot and my college has stated I cannot return next year.  My parents and I agree that I should take a year off from school.  I want to take the rest of my life off and just go ski and coach, which are the only two things that really make me happy.  I live in the mid-west and the flatness and the weather here really depress me.  I just don't feel like school is for me, but I know it isn't practical to try to be a ski bum the rest of my life.  The very idea though of trying to return to a campus and study stuff I don't care about makes me feel overwhelmed and trapped.  I don't know where to go from here.  

Answer:  It sounds like you do know what you want, you are just asking for permission to do something you and your parents think is impractical.  Let me tell you what I think is impractical, spending four years and 160,000 on a business degree so you can pray to get a job that you don't really want and maybe save up enough money to go skiing 20 days a year (by the time you are 30).

When I was 22 a man asked me what I really wanted to do.  I told him I wanted to travel around and put on presentations about male socialization and violence.  He asked, "Why don't you?"  I thought no one would take me seriously.  I thought I needed a masters degree.  I still gave it a shot but I didn't go after it very hard because I didn't believe I was "qualified".

12 years later I have two masters degrees and the knowledge that no one is going to take me seriously because of those.  Now I do those presentations but I'm not as good at them as I would have been back then because I'm out of practice.

The best education in life IS LIFE.  If you have a dream job find someone who is actually doing it and offer to work for them for free for as many hours as you can possibly spare.  Someone is getting paid to do something that you would pay to do.  I talk to people and coach lacrosse for a living.  Both are things I would pay to do.  If you are passionate about what you do and there is a market for your service you can make a living.

The purpose of college is a sorting machine where the really rich and the really bright meet and partner up as friends, romantically, and for business.  You don't need college for that, you can skip that step and go meet the people who are already where you want to be and form relationships.  College is a great life experience but it is not essential unless you want to go into certain fields which require a special license or certification. 

Dan Miller, author of the book 48 days to the work you love hosts a free pod cast that you can download from itunes or from his website http://www.48days.net/ which gives people advice about how to pursue their dream using practical steps that you can show to your parents.  Use this year to meet people and soak up experience and you will find you get a lot more useful knowledge out of that than any college could have given you. 

When you are the one who has "failed out" it feels like you are all alone and everybody else has their stuff together.  Most of your peers are just going through the motions of going to college because that is what everyone expected.   Many of them will hit their identity crisis in 3 years as graduation looms and they still have no idea what they really want to do with their lives.

Your mission now is to fail forward.  This experience is an opportunity if you can learn from it and use that information to make a quality plan for your future.  When you are feeling overwhelmed take smaller bites and chew, we don't swallow life a year at a time we do it day by day.