How to Stop Losing Motivation To Study and Keep Exam Motivation?
Hey! We constantly share excellent educational resources with you, talk about them and why it is worth doing self-education at all, but we completely ignore the topic of motivation for studying and exams. Today we want to correct this mistake and talk about how not to lose such a necessary thing as motivation while learning and practicing new material for your brain.
In this post, we will talk about how not to drive yourself into depression by constantly introducing information into your not infinitely large head, about why it is normal to lose motivation, and most importantly, about what to do when you want to give up and stop doing what seems to be necessary.
Personal Experience
At university, I studied computer science and specialized in cybersecurity. During my first three years of study, I was drawn to data analysis and big data processing, and in my final year of study, I decided to dedicate my graduation project to this topic and I explored various ways to compromise the database. In a word, I was engaged in white hacking.
I was so passionate about my topic, I was so interested in all this that when it came down to it, when it was necessary to write down my experiments in reports, and not sit in a hostel and drink a bottle of beer and laugh with neighbors at the campus database, access to which I received, I burned out. On the course, I was the best when it came to databases, but the prospect of writing down my every step, reporting to someone for my actions, explaining to someone what is obvious and simple for me, I just gave up and fell into depression.
On top of these thoughts about the graduation project, I was disturbed by the thought that it would not end there. If or when I get a job as a white-hat hacker, I will have absolutely the same prospects: reporting to someone, explaining something to someone, a lot of paperwork that I can’t stand. In a word, I realized that I didn’t need something that I had been going for so many years with such persistence, I realized that despite the fact that I’m good at it, things are waiting for me that I don’t want to face and that just destroy me from the inside.
Me, a person who devoted every free minute to self-education, who constantly read technical literature, instead of the next Marvel movie, who, instead of parties on campus, run local servers, was disappointed in everything. I lost the motivation to study something further, because what's the point - I thought - if I can never do what I want anyway.
Secondary Target
The first and probably the most important thing that I realized for myself when I was looking for a new motivation for myself is that you should not give self-education the highest priority. In most cases, we have it from our parents. It is they who inspire us from childhood that education is very important and there is nothing more important than it. By saving money for a college for their child for many years, parents subconsciously program their children - see how and how much we try for you, your education and future.
Homer Simpson Studying - The Simpons Meme
Because of this, when studying at a university or even at school, we feel pressure from the outside, we feel that we owe something to someone. Education becomes the number one goal. This is the main problem. Education should never be given the main goal. Think for yourself - you graduated from the university and received a diploma for which you worked so hard for four years, and what's next? Rather than the diploma itself, the paper itself will make you happy and solve all your problems and help your dreams come true. I'll reveal a secret, but no.
Education, whether it be an online course or higher education at a university, is a secondary goal. This, like money, is a tool that will allow you to achieve your goals, ambitions and other things, and you should treat education that way. This is a banal thought and many understand it, but for some reason they don’t fully realize it and continue to sacrifice sleep or personal life just to prepare for the exam.
Eternal Process
Another thought that came to me while searching for a new motivation is that education is an eternal process. No matter how rude it may be, but you and I essentially do not know how to do anything and do not know anything. Each of us in the end can be good at one thing, if we're lucky.
Kyle Broflovski Studying - South Park
It is impossible to go into a trance for several years, learning something new 24/7, and then wake up and solve any mathematical problems and derive new formulas that the world has not yet seen. We learn all our lives and most often learn from the experience of others. All scientific discoveries ever made are based on the discoveries of previous generations, and so on until the time when people realized that it was possible to use a sharp stick as a tool.
It is worth realizing for yourself that it is not possible to learn something in a few evenings or weeks, and therefore it is easier to treat education, and less strictly to yourself. Courses, books and webinars such as "JavaScript in 4 hours" or "Conversational Spanish in 30 minutes" are designed primarily for people who burn out to learning as quickly as the time intervals in the names of these resources and these people understand this very well, because such resources are popular.
Relax and realize that you can't learn everything. You can’t prepare perfectly for an exam at a university or for a certificate, you can’t know everything and be ready for everything. Even if you train and study all your life, eventually you will come across something you don't know. You need to take such a meeting with the unknown calmly and just keep doing it.
Keep Doing
Sounds like a modified Nike slogan. Perhaps this is so. Once, among the tips to combat procrastination, I heard such simple advice that I still remember and follow - if you don’t want to do anything, just start with the little things. This advice helped me fight laziness. So, for example, when, waking up in the morning, I had no desire to work or study, I began to do household chores.
I brushed my teeth, cleaned and washed dishes, dusted, although there was no dust (no, I'm not crazy). The thing is that starting from small things, each time we set ourselves up for the fact that since we have done so much, we can work now. Such a struggle with laziness and loss of motivation led to the fact that I brushed my teeth 4 times a day and erased my enamel, but these are other problems.
As for training and exams. If something is difficult or there is simply no desire to learn something new, and this is necessary, then the easy way out is to simply slow down and do the same thing, only in a less formal setting. Most importantly, just don't stop. If this is reading, then why not drink some tequila while reading, if this is the development of an application for a graduation project, then why not include a series in parallel.
Anything that can distract you will do. Yes, productivity will decrease, but much more noticeable and significant for us will be the decrease in tension and the pain that we go through so much concentrating on the letters on paper or the keyboard. Just don't stop - no matter if your productivity drops by 20% or 200%, the main thing is that you keep going.
Start smth of Your Own
Since our site is mostly devoted to educational IT resources, this point also mainly relates to teaching IT skills. As I already said, my graduation work made me seriously think about what career I chose for myself, think about what I would like to avoid in my life, because of which the motivation to study completely disappeared. But I did not tell what exactly pulled me out of this downtime and procrastination.
The fact is that I temporarily stopped my permanent 4-year study (I did not leave the university, rather I quit self-education), and devoted all the time spent on courses and books to a personal project. I started blogging. It was completely separate from my field of activity and was dedicated to snowboarding. I am a big fan of this sport and have been doing it professionally myself.
This hobby helped me to distract myself, I realized that the whole world does not revolve around me and my scientific work that I wrote (how beautiful it would not be). I realized for myself that there are a lot of other and interesting things that I could do and devote my time to, maybe even achieve something. Yes, I'm less of an expert at writing articles and blog posts than I am at white hat database hacking, but I have a choice.
Conclusion
This article is very personal. I told you about how I personally struggled with the loss of motivation for learning. It took me a year and a half to realize these simple and even basic things. For a year and a half, I could not return to learning something new and was already concentrating on what I know and can do. For a year and a half, I had no desire to open books, take courses, or go to graduate school, which I once dreamed of. But realizing that I am not unique, that the earth does not revolve around me, that there is always a choice and is limited exclusively by our complexes, I received a small, but still dose of motivation for future learning.