Five Very Basic Tips That Have Helped Me Immensely in Staying Happier & Stress Free

Five very basic tips that have helped me immensely in staying happier & stress free:

1.     Stop overthinking. Most of our stress is internally generated due to our habit of overthinking. If your friend or boss does not reply to your message, it does not mean he hates you. It might just mean he is occupied at the moment. If a presentation did not go well, that does not mean it is the end of your career. Everyone has bad days. It just means you need to focus on your next presentation, instead of spending the next few hours overthinking.
2. 
       Stay positive. Never allow negative thoughts to stay in your mind. Do not fight with anyone or shout at anyone unnecessarily, as that takes away your own energy as well. Do not feel hurt if someone does not invite you to a party. Anger, ego, disappointment, impatience - all these are negative energies that you need to avoid as much as possible.
3. 
       Stay occupied. As they say, the empty mind is the devil’s workshop. Keep yourself occupied all the time. If you have free time, learn some new skill. Develop a hobby that you really like, and that will keep you occupied during your free time.
4. 
       Stop caring about what others think. Stop adhering to the norms of society if you don’t want to. People will always judge you, no matter what you do. Stop getting affected by the expectations others have from you. At the same time, stop expecting anything from others as well. Focus on your own work and interests instead.
5. 
      Embrace solitude. Sometimes, all you need is some quiet time with yourself to release all your negative thoughts and fill your mind with contentment. Being with others all the time will not give you the chance to free your mind of stress. Go out for an evening walk alone, spend some time alone listening to soothing music, spend some time reading a book, or just spend some time travelling alone. Do whatever appeals you, but embrace solitude.

If you wish to get in touch with me, feel free to contact me on Instagram: Rohan Jain (@jainrohanrj) 

-Rohan Jain,IIM(PGDM),IIT(B.Tech)

Let me tell you a small story

Let me tell you a small story.

It is about RBI Assistant 2015 batch recruitment.

General seats: 15.

Applicants? Just imagine.

A guy I know wanted to appear for this examination. His academic qualifications:

• Class IX: 45%. 37/100 in Mathematics.
• Schooling: Saraswati Vidya Mandir (Hindi Medium).
• Tried Kota (Rajasthan), failed miserably.
• College: Lovely Professional University.
• First job: ICICI PO Programme. He left that in 2014.
• 2014 IBPS PO interview reject.
• 2015 SBI PO mains failure.

This guy looked average, he didn't have any contacts (I am not saying looking good and having contacts makes a difference, but then people generally tend to assume that, so just to clarify). He wasn’t a prodigy. Heck! He wasn't even comparable to the people appearing for banking examinations. He never achieved anything significant which caused his confidence to be on the ground zero level. January 2015, he suffered a heartbreak, as he was cheated on by someone who he almost planned to marry, just after he had left his job in December 2014 and was under tremendous pressure to find employment. Only thing positive he had was resources. A laptop, good internet connection and decent stationery.

He had just one thing in his mind, to make his mother proud. He followed just one mantra. Prepare hard and go all-in. For a period of 6–8 months, this guy prepared almost 12–14 hours on daily basis without fail. He knew he is far, far behind everyone appearing for this exam, so he gave his everything.

Result: He got Rank 2 in the final merit list. He cried so hard that he left a scream. It may seem a small achievement when you compare it to others who crack IAS, IPS coming from a humble background, but it was the biggest breakthrough for him in the worst phase of his life.

Why this story?

• He had probably the worst academic record among all serious aspirants.
• Seats were 15.
• He was a Hindi medium student.
• He was terrible in Mathematics.
• He was in worst phase of his life mentally.
• He was under pressure of unemployment.

If this guy can crack the exam, why can't you? You just need one seat at the end, right? You might be better equipped, more intelligent, more mentally stable than him. Just prepare wholeheartedly and go all-in.

Itna tough nahi hai, ho jayega! (It isn't that tough, you'll crack it)

-Utkarsh Awasthi

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Blogger's Note: The writer is talking about himself.

} 

Failing a Course at IIT

I had failed a first semester course at IITK, albeit temporarily, and the whole ordeal was pretty frustrating.

I was at home for the winter break, and had asked my roommate to check my grades. He called me and told me that I had a 10 and I was so happy. When I returned to IITK and checked my grades myself, I found that I did indeed have an A in all credit courses, but had got a fail grade in the wonderful Morning Exercise (PE101) course.

For those who don't know much about how stuff works at IITK, PE101 and PE102 (the even semester Evening exercise counterpart) are the two most useless courses at IITK. Twice a week, you are supposed to go for sports stuff for an hour or so in the evening (though the course is named morning exercise). If you are good enough to be selected for the institute sports team, you have to go for practice for that. Rest of the public are slotted into the dreaded NCC. There are no credits for this course, but you fail it if you don't have 75% attendance. There were stories of high CPI students who had to stay after their expected graduation time simply because they couldn't clear one of the PE courses.

So I had failed this silly course for lack of attendance, and the reason was that I was on leave for more than two weeks to represent India at IOI 2007. I had done most of the stuff to ensure that the weeks of leave did not affect me. I had talked to every course instructor and had taken care of labs and quizzes and stuff. The NCC people were the biggest pain. I tried to tell them that I had the institute leave letter and that I was going to represent India at an international event, but they kept repeating "Less than 75% attendance, you will fail". I gave up on them since I worked out that I could manage the 75% attendance If I did not miss a single NCC parade day while I was on campus.

What I had counted wrong was the number of evening exercise days. Apparently, there was an extra evening exercise day while I was away that I wasn't aware of, and that meant that I was one day short of managing the 75%.

I spent a lot of time screaming silently and pulling my hair out. I was now the quintessential muggu guy that people made stories out of : The ten pointer who couldn't pass the PE course. The jokes were already starting, and the reception from home wasn't too positive either. I had never failed a course in my life, and this course definitely didn't deserve to be the first.

What really worried me was the possibility of losing my scholarship due to  this mess. I had been the recipient of KVPY fellowship since XI standard. 50K+ per year was not a small amount of money to pay for fees, and the scholarship helped ensure that I didn't have to bother my parents for the same. Every year, the scholarship is renewed on the condition that academic performance is satisfactory and some research activity is done. If the fail grade wasn't changed by August when I was supposed to send the renewal request, I would probably lose my scholarship.

I decided to take my chance and talk to the dean of students affairs (DOSA), who was also the official instructor for this course. Prof. Prawal Sinha was really nice to me, though he did take the opportunity to tell me how it was was stupid of me not to take care of this earlier. He assured me that he will take care of the grade.

But boy, did it take long. I had to run from office to office in the old and scary Faculty building for weeks and months. I had talked to DOSA in early January. End of Jan, Feb, there was no change. I got progressively more and more restless. Kept meeting DOSA and the UG section in-charge every week or so. I even wrote a mail to the director, which the DOSA didn't like much. I probably ran around the campus more to get my grade changed than most students did during the PE sessions.

Eventually, somewhere around March-April, the grade was changed and I got the modified transcript. This was more relieving than anything that happened to me at IITK. The computer system that takes care of grades and stuff claimed that I had both passed the course and had a backlog in it. Got that bit fixed in my third year or something, but that took merely three or four visits to the UG office.

-Raziman T.V.

Emotionally Damaged

You feel numb, find it hard to connect, want to over-connect, find it hard to spend time apart, struggle with trust, inherently don’t believe others, have a hard time regulating your emotional state, consistently over-respond to minor situations, under-respond to major situations, fear being loved, fear your own anger, have too much anger, have self-hatred….the list goes on and on.

Being emotionally damaged can take endless forms.

Despite it all, what it shows is that - for better or worse - you *experience* emotions….and that’s a beautiful thing. You want that.

Your emotions are just not working in your best interest right now.

Emotional damage happens when a part of you is stuck in survival mode.

Maybe it’s from childhood, a former relationship, abuse that’s happened to you, an experience that was beyond your control, a loss, or the many things that can stop us in our tracks and change the way we see the world.

But wherever you are, just know that emotional damage is something you can come back from.

There is hope, and there is a great life waiting for you ahead. Please take the chance, reach out, and find the help you need to move forward.

You don’t need to live like this.

-Julie Gurner,I'm a doc of psychology

One Trait to Maximize Your Potential

I know a guy, who was rejected by 7 companies, even by TCS.

Then, something happened……….

He ended up with the highest package in his college.

He is my younger brother.

---

I know a guy who couldn't qualify JEE.

Then, something happened……….

He ended up with a package of 22 LPA, more than most of the IITians

He is my room mate's friend.

---

I know a girl who suffered from extreme under confidence. She would stammer even in mock interviews.

Then, something happened……….

She perfectly nailed her IIM A interview. She even managed to make the interviewer laugh, very rare.

She is my friend’s sister.

---

I know a guy who would struggle to even understand English, being from a hindi medium school.

Even after scoring 99.5 percentile in Quants in CAT. He couldn’t clear CAT, because of English.

Then, something happened……….

In a recent Exam he took, he scored almost a perfect score in English.

He is my room mate.

---

I know a guy, whose teacher said that if he sits for JEE Advance, it will be a joke on him and his parents.

Then, something happened………..

That guy ended up clearing JEE, that very year.

That guy is me.

---

Now, let’s try to understand what exactly happened in

“Then, something happened……….”

This is what happened:

1. They felt devastated, broken and lost.
2. They wanted to give up but DIDN’T.
3. Toiled hard, very hard in the face of difficulties.
4. Gave it their all.

and finally achieved what they wanted.

Most people just give up after STEP 1. They will distract themselves by watching YouTube videos, movies, gossiping with friends and what not.

But there is another set of people, who have it in themselves to work hard in the face of rejections and these are the people who get what they aspire for.

To not give up and to keep working in the face of difficulties is not only underrated but rare and precious trait somebody can have.

-Shubham Singh Chauhan

B.tech from Indian Institute of Technology Varanasi (IIT BHU) (Graduated 2018)

The Psychology of Self-Sabotage

Give Me Only ONE Advice to Improve & Succeed. Here it Is..........

Persevere

The concept of perseverance is nothing new. We understand perseverance at a very rudimentary definition level, yet many of us don’t persevere.

Here’s an example of how our mind protect us “Time to give up mate, you ain’t a cult and this thing isn’t for you”.

We give up too early & easily because we don’t understand the concept of perseverance. Our mind is designed to protect us from everything and every situation. It requires creative mindset to come up with the answers for all the set-backs, negativity, rejection and reasons why you’re not reaching your goal.

It requires lot of practice. The beginning is awful for everybody. There’s no sense of absolute direction. But it’s the sheer willingness to persevere that makes the final difference.

In life, we need to make a choice. Either you give one more shot, or call it a day.

4 examples of people who have built perseverance after repeated failures:

1. Someone scored 43% marks in mathematics in 10th standard is now a young scientist and pursuing PhD
2. Someone who hated studying is now a trained medical doctor & treating patients in remote areas
3. A backbencher was able to get in top investing company as lead analyst with a basic graduate degree, settled in silicon valley and earns more than college topper
4. A NIFT graduate who started a food tech company is now employing more than 10 employees (in <1 year)

They have varied expectation from life but they made a decision of not giving up and to pursue their life goals.

Without revealing the details “one is my sister, one is my best friend, one is my good friend and one is school friend”.

The fact that I know these people very closely, makes me happy. :)

What’s the common ingredient? Perseverance.

The two main ingredients for building perseverance

1. Mindset
2. Belief in yourself

Thanks for reading.

Mithu :)

I understand material but cant solve problems. How to change it?

As someone who teaches computing, I see this issue a lot. Overall, I agree with Jeff Erickson's Answer to I understand material but cant solve problems

I will add some more context.

Many students don’t really know what learning means. They think memorizing facts or “looking over notes” is enough. Often, because they have done well in earlier classes that way. They think that if an assignment says to write a poker game, then submitting a working poker game means they understood the assignment, even if they submit their roommate’s program, find 90% of it on the web, or get TAs to dictate most of the program to them. They focus on getting a grade or a working program by any means they can, even if they don’t actually learn to do the things that are asked of them. I see this every semester. Students come to office to ask about the exams and say “I do so well on the assignments.” So I ask them to describe their work process, and I know where we are when I hear “When an assignment comes out, I read it over [good!] and then go to office hours, because I know I’ll need help [bad].” What’s bad? Going to office hours to get TAs to tell you stuff before you’ve actually tried anything yourself. Getting help AFTER you’ve tried a few times and thought about things deeply is good. Going before you’ve even thought it through or drawn or a picture of a data structure or listed subtasks is bad, because you are robbing yourself of learning.

I often remind students that the world doesn’t need 200 more poker programs (or search tool, or RPN calculator, or whatever). The point of the assignment isn’t to get a working poker program: it’s to develop the skills that, it turns out, let you write something like a poker problem. If you actually engage the exercise authentically, you will develop the skills and you’ll get the program as a side effect of that. Figuring out how to get the result without developing the skills undercuts the assignment.

Any course, not just computing or other STEM courses, should give you new abilities, skills, not just information and a grade. History classes should ultimately teach you how to analyze evidence and historical processes in a way that allows you to interpret, for example, current events. This is MUCH more than memorizing.

One way to understand this situation is to consider a version of Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning (What Is Bloom's Taxonomy? A Definition For Teachers -

)

Bloom classified skills into different levels. There are a few versions around, but let’s pick this one: memorization, understanding, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, evaluating, and some add creating (the one at the link above leaves this out, but I think it’s important).

I was lucky to learn this in high school. I had a high school teacher who would classify her assignments into these categories, and she said memorizing was important, but if you only did the memorization assignments, you got a D. That’s the lowest, minimal level of cognitive skill. And yet most students come to college believing that’s all there is! To get a C, you had to show understanding (usually by being able to summarize things in your own words) and apply information to novel situations. To get a B, you had to analyze situations (solutions) and synthesize novel approaches from the different things you had studied. To get an A, you had do think critically and evaluate things and create something new (for her, this was always a creative presentation to the rest of the class). I had her for two classes. She drove me nuts, and she made me realize what learning really means. Thank you, Ms. Evans! After her class, I not only learned to set my sights higher, but I developed some skill at evaluating my own understanding. “Does this make sense?” That means I might be up to a D level of understanding. Can I recognize when to apply this? Now we’re getting somewhere! I find many students are unable to evaluate their own understanding, and they suffer the self-delusion of assuming that, if they turned in a working program dictated by the TA, and the grade was good, they must have been successful.

Honestly, most exams, even in STEM classes, have most of the questions at the lower levels. But, in computing, we routinely ask you to understand programs on the exam (without a roommate or TA there to explain things to you or a computer you can use to run it), and we ask you to solve a problem, devise an algorithm, and write code. That gets at application, which many students are not used to doing. (Math is the same: can you see when to apply the chain rule, for example.) We will sometimes get at the higher levels, though not so often creativity. For example, we may ask for an algorithm/function to do something, then ask about its runtime or memory complexity, then ask about alternatives and what situations would be best for which alternatives (analysis and evaluation). As a working programmer, this last step, the ability to weigh alternatives based on the current need, is vital.

So, the key to doing better on exams is not to think about how to get better exam grades. That’s trying to get the effect without working on the cause. You need to practice. Do practice problems. Do lab problems if there are any. Then, you and your friends can test yourself by proposing variations on lab/practice problems and solve them. When you read, read actively: do the exercises and work through the examples on your own and make sure you are able to derive everything yourself. It can be very effective to have a study group where you pick problems, work on them separately, and them compare your solutions. You’ll find each other’s mistakes, and you’ll have the experience of solving a problem yourself, and then seeing and evaluating a few other solutions.

Good skill!

-Mark Sheldon, PhD Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT) (1995)

Kind of People Who Will Live Life To The Fullest

Two types of people live life to the fullest.

1: Ignorant

If you are totally ignorant of the happening in the world, you can live life to the fullest.

A sheep or a goat live its life to the fullest even when it is taken for slaughtering because it does not know that it is going to die soon.

In the same way, if you are ignorant of the consequences of your actions and the laws of the world, you would enjoy your life to the fullest till such time, you are hit by a calamity or die.

2: Wise

If you are a wise person, you know the deepest secrets of the world. Hence, you know what is to be done and what is not to be done. You don’t do anything that can bring you suffering and hence you don’t suffer in life. You only perform actions that brings you joy and hence your life is filled with joy and you live fully.

If most people in the world are suffering from numerous pains, it is because they are neither ignorant nor are they wise.

They are only semi-knowledgeable and half wise.

They have little knowledge of the world and yet they believe that know it all.

Hence, they keep doing things for the sake of happiness and joy, but that brings them sufferings and pain.

It is impossible to be ignorant once you have acquired some knowledge.

Hence, the only way to live your life fully is to become wise and live a virtuous life.

-Awdhesh Singh, Phd, Ex-IRS,IITD(M.Tech),IT-BHU (B.Tech)

#13 Last But Not Least, Be Macro-Patient, Micro-Aggressive

Live your everyday to the fullest by doing what’s necessary. Learn to differentiate what’s within and beyond your circle of control. Once you’ve done your best, what happens, happens. Be patient and keep grinding.

As long as you’re working in the right direction, things will work out. The most important of all, enjoy the journey - even if it sucks sometimes.

-David Woon

#12 Make Journal. Help Your Brain To Keep Up With its Thoughts

A human has 50,000 to 70,000 thoughts per day

Let’s assume 99% of the thoughts are crappy, we still have 500 to 700 (1%) valuable thoughts per day. We can’t keep up with all our thoughts. Hence I always journal my thoughts so I can work on them later.

Get your notebooks handy. Or simply make notes in your mobile phones or laptops. Evernote and Trello are there to help you.

-Dylan Woon