There are people in this world who think life is hard, and guess what? Life will always be hard to them
There are some people who think life is full of opportunities, guess what? They will have most opportunities in their life.
Some people believe that life is unfair, and co-incidentally life can will be unfair to them.
While this might not sound logical but it actually is, and the reason for this is a lot of how your life will be greatly depends on your perspective.
You can have all the wealth and power in this world, but if your perspective of looking at your life is like “Man! I have all this but yet im not happy and I feel miserable” in that case you will be miserable no matter the amount of wealth or power you have.
On the contrary, if you are a person who is currently struggling in his/her life but if you have the perspective and attitude of a warrior and you think like “Yes, time is not in my favour and nothing is going well, I am in terrible circumstances but guess what? I am a strong person and I have the power and the will to get out of it”. Guess what, if you have such attitude you will eventually get out of it sooner or later and emerge as a much stronger person.
Let’s take an example which you might relate to:
Let’s say you are preparing for an exam, or a job interview.
There are two ways you can approach them.
Approach 1:
You can either say, I hate studying, its so boring and I hate prepping for exams/interview however I will force myself to do it and get it done ASAP so that I can later engage in more fun activities like hanging out with my friends.
Approach 2:
Or, you may take an alternative path like “Man! this material seems so interesting, I can get to learn new things, I cant wait to get my hands on that book.”
Different approaches give different results.
The guy who follows the first approach will not only score less or fail at the interview, but the whole process of studying will leave him frustrated.
On the contrary, the guy who chooses the 2nd approach will not only enjoy his work, but he will also ace his exam/interview and there is no chance of getting frustrated doing something you love.
This applies to almost everything in your life, be it work, academics, relationships etc.
The kind of outlook, attitude and perspective you have towards life will determine the kind of life you will eventually have
Marry and have a child with a disastrous choice of partner; you will be bound to them for the rest of your life via the child and will pay dearly for this mistake.
Settle into a job/career that isn’t satisfying and locks-in a dependence on the money from that job.
Spend all the money made and fail to invest in something like a house or shares; the compounding effect is such a powerful goldmine you’ll fail to exploit and money will always need to be earnt without leverage.
Tolerate bad treatment from boy/girlfriends friends…it trains you into what you’ll tolerate and resent for the rest of your life.
Focus on meeting outward demands instead of cultivating character through education, introspection, therapy, and personal development; ignorance of your inner motivations leaves you a slave to the training you got as a child which is geared toward satisfying others instead of empowering and fulfilling yourself.
Yes, engineering from Tier 3 college is a waste of Time, Money and emotion, if you are someone who loves to stay in your super comfort zone! If you are someone who does not believe in working hard and waste your time in college(4 years) doing nothing and expecting something great to happen someday! It might sound harsh but this is the reality of most of the Tier 3 colleges in India.
No, engineering from Tier 3 college is not a waste of time,if You are a self-learner and highly motivated person to achieve something. If you wish to work hard and don't sit back for the Training and Placement Cell to do a miracle for you.If you have the courage to go through the depressing phase or rather the most challenging phase of life(when you are searching for an off-campus Job or internship). I understand that getting a job or internship in a great firm is not that simple but yes it's not impossible as well. This might sound funny for some of you but its the truth. I am from Kalyani Government Engineering College(State Government Engineering College). I know the situation of tier 3 Colleges very well. Because of the lack of motivation and culture in the college people often tends to lose the motivation they had before joining the college. There are many alumni from my college working in Tier 1 Companies(Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, Qualcomm, and others) and there are alumni from my college working in service-based companies and then there are many who are jobless. Thus you can conclude that it is not the college but the People what actually matters. So it is up to you how you utilize your time in college. It's easy to find an excuse and keep crying but difficult to actually work hard to get something you dream of!
90% of people do not give their best. They either show off or waste time in complaining or give fake assurance to self that they are doing their best.
So here is a trick -
If you want to be successful at something, please understand that you are competing with only 10% of people.
Don't be scared looking at other 90% because these are the people who are there because:
1.Their parents, friends or colleagues told them to try for It
2.They are over confident
3.They are a part of little work, little play and all show off
4.They are too stubborn to change their opinions
5.They don't know what they are doing
6.They are the ones who begin at rocket pace but soon adopt turtle pace.
7.They don't want to succeed as hard as they are pretending they want to succeed
8.They are busy doing multitasking
9.They suffer from superiority complex
10.They are busy doing comparisons
11.They have only one goal - to earn money
12.They change their goals too easily
13.They don't work silently rather they work to prove their worth
14.They are insecure about everything
15.They interfere in other people's business
16.They are not consistent with their work
17.They give up easily
So If you are preparing for world's toughest exam or be an astronaut or the next Einstein or A. R.Rahman - get this in your head that you have to compete with only 10% of people.
And if you are doing anything or all from above mentioned 17 pointers - please accept the fact that you are also a part of 90%.
I'll speak on behalf of a close friend of mine, who attended an unknown university from where I am from (Lima, Peru), and got accepted for a fully funded PhD to work with the world-leaders (including Nobel Laureates) at Systems Biology and Computational Biology at Harvard, UC San Francisco and Rockefeller.
I'd like to add, that he beat his competitors at interviewing for Grad School from MIT, Harvard, Caltech, Stanford, Yale, and other top institutions. It's one thing to go to get a PhD at MIT because you did your undergrad at Caltech, but its a completely different story if a kid from a developing country who went to a no-mans-land university beats you at grad school and got to work with a Nobel Laureate. This guy was the deal, and he went from zero to hero.
His success story:
1) Discipline: He had no Facebook during his undergraduate years, and probably only went online for doing homework, assignments or coordinating projects. This reduced his distraction span to zero.
2) Emotional Intelligence: He could control his emotional and sexual impulses. He was very socially intelligent around diverse groups, but he had in mind that having a girlfriend during his undergraduate years would be a major distraction. Both he and I when we were freshman knew that we wanted to go to USA for a PhD, so we were lifelong buddies who always noticed the good and bad things about each other. While I would sometime complain that he didn't go out on weekends (because he never did), he would always complain that I cared too much about appearance, partying and personal marketing. He was not socially handicapped as some people might think a 'nerd' would be, he was actually a very mature person who could talk about anything.
3) Sacrifice: We came from a place where dogs literally walked inside our classroom, and cockroaches would on occasion crawl in our backpack in class. He didn't let any of this get to him. He actually used the poor infrastructure of our engineering building as a motivation, something like "one day I'm going to get out of this hell hole, and do something great for science". He also had a great sense of patriotism.
4) Stellar passion and motivation: The first semester, I found out that he had the highest GPA of the whole class, and I immediately called him by the phone. I didn't understand a thing of what he said because the signal was low. However, the next day he seemed very depressed and told me that his grandfather had passed away. His grandfather was like his father to him and he never got the chance to tell him that he achieved first place in his engineering class. Little did we know, after a couple of weeks we realized not only was he the first in class, he was first in the entire campus achieving the highest GPA (grades in Peru are from 0 to 20, and with no curve). He graduated Summa Cum Laude 2 years ago, and got the highest GPA at our university over the last 30 years. The other person previous to him was Barton Zwiebach, a renowned Peruvian string theorist and Professor at MIT.
5) No pain, no gain: He went overkill sometimes to achieve his goal. I'm talking things like not having lunch to study an extra hour, sleep 4-5 hours a day at least 5 days a week, sleeping on the bus to get extra sleep time, and most dazzling thing of all was that most of the time he didn't go to class. He just stayed studying in the library and was at least 2 or 3 weeks ahead of the professor. Even if he did go to class, he rarely paid attention, he would go over his books to see what methods other authors would teach. He would buy and download at least 5 different books per subject and read them all to learn and to study for the test. He would go over all the proofs and learn them, study them, do them, sometimes reinvent the proofs or see if he could grasp the concept in anticipation of what the book would reveal.
6) Selecting friends: His paradigm for selecting friends (or colleagues) was impressive. He didn't care if it was me (a spoiled rich kid), or the son of a blue-collar family that was a national math Olympiad. He valued people for their ideas and it didn't matter to him where they were from, but where they were going.
7) Becoming a preacher: He was never reluctant on teaching. Whenever anyone would ask him something he would go over the concepts and explain it to him. This was really beneficial for our closed group of friends, as we each learned different concepts and he checked with us or we discussed any doubts we had.
8) Be ambitious: All of his life, he was the best at everything he did. Before enrolling at our engineering school, he was making around $3000 a month by only winning Magic The Gathering Card competitions, and he was Peru's #1 player and Ranked in the top 10 world wide. *Not bad for a 16 year old, at that time.
9) He majored in Robotics Engineering: So yes, he did learn Optimal and Digital Control, Fourier Analysis, Triple integrals, differential equations, etc.. We didn't have computers for our programming tests, they were all done on pen and paper.
I usually avoid giving advice since generic ‘gyaan’ is not of much use, and I rarely have specific and useful things to say.
However, since you have asked this question, here is what comes to my mind:
Remember that the odds of getting into a top Civil Service (IAS/IPS/IFS) are probably 200–300 out of 10 lacs. While we all talk about the big successes, there are 100 times more candidates who don’t make it despite being very capable and working very hard.
In my own batch at IIT there was a guy much smarter than me, who was academically brilliant. He never made it even to the interview stage, if I remember correctly.
It does not mean that you can’t beat the odds but keep that perspective and know what you are up against.
Decide how many years you want to give to the exam. Even though many people have spent 3–5 years, I am reluctant to suggest that one should spend that much time. Give it a year or two, and then give it your best shot.
If you are writing the exam, go all out, day and night. It should be a total war, not a skirmish. You should be able to put in 10–12 hrs a day with intense focus, if not more. Though I am talking about number of hours, remember that the quality of effort is more important.
Hard work is not enough - you need to know how to prepare the fastest for each topic/subject. In our days at IIT Kanpur, we used to get very good info about which topic to prepare from which book from previous year’s candidates. IITK used to produce many toppers and they had figured out a lot of things over time. It made the preparation very efficient. I suspect it must be much easier now due to organized coaching etc.
It is a long exhausting journey. Unless you are personally super-motivated, don’t do it due to social or family pressure. At some point the only thing that will drive you is the fire burning inside you.
I will skip any specific advice on which subject to take or which study material to use. I am sure there are people much better qualified than me to do that.
All I can say is that nothing is easy, but everything is doable. Good luck.
My cousin and his father own a big brand of apparels—they own several showrooms, and mills.
I have never seen both of them wake up before ten am unless they have a flight to catch.
I think it's in their genes to sleep till late.
Instead of sleeping for four hours, they use their mind and manage their business well in six to seven hours a day.
My brother won't wake up at one pm if you don't force him. He cleared Bank PO, SSC (twice), ONGC, and some other papers. He didn't fail in any competitive exam he gave. Also, he was the topper of his school.
I don't know why people form this misconception about sleep and ruin their life.
Sleep is one of the most critical aspects of our life.
Without sleep, there is no strength, no intelligence, no wisdom and no joy.
Sleeplessness causes anxiety, depression, stress, drowsiness, weakness, and slows down your mind.
Sleep makes your body relaxed and improves your productivity.
After a good sleep, you understand things with clarity and faster.
Answering this question-
I completely disagree with the hypothesis that successful people sleep less, leave aside four hours.
(And please don't quote one person out of one million people)
I pray to everyone reading this, don't destroy your sleep in the hope of doing something big in life.
Instead, use the remaining time productively without procrastinating.
You are going to meet him. You are tired, still the thought of eating dinner with him cheers you up. You can’t wait to share how good the day had been. You also want to discuss about your career plan with him. You know he might be hesistant. It makes you nervous. But you are somewhat confident that you can convince him.
This is the example of a good relationship.
You are going to meet him. You feel scared. You strongly pray that he is in a good, understanding mood and dinner should end on a happy and peaceful note at least this time.
This is the example of a toxic relationship.
A healthy relationship is another source of your happiness. The person forms your support. It might not give you happiness or peace always but it gives you strength to sail through difficult times.
Toxic relationship is the sink for happiness you obtain from other sources. It makes you very weak and vulnerable. Most of your time goes in searching for happiness bubles on the surface of the ocean of bitterness with flimsier hopes.
So
The best way to check if the relationship works for you or not is to
Monitor how you mind and body feels when you are with your partner.
If you feel nervous, scared, uncomfortable or traumatic, it is high time you need to consider whether you want to go ahead with the relationship or not
They mistake shallow, positive feelings that they feel for a short time for love.
They wanted to have sex with you and described that to you as love.
They have a personality disorder and “split” —shifted from seeing you as all-good to all-bad—because something you said or did triggered them.
They lied when they said they loved you and knew they were lying.
They told you they loved you in response to you saying it to them and they felt obligated to say it back in return.
Punchline: Unfortunately, the word “love” is used for many different things. People say that they love ice cream, a particular book, the way a haircut looks, and their spouse. If someone says “I love you” and is able to walk away and ghost you, whatever they meant by love is different than the deep, stable, caring positive feelings that most people seek from a mate.
Elinor Greenberg, PhD, CGP
In private practice and the author of the book: Borderline, Narcissistic, and Schizoid Adaptations.
I was an Engineering Officer (EO) posted at Indian Oil Corporation Marketing HO, Mumbai. I got into IOC through Gate 2018. Indian Oil inducts Grade ‘A’ officers from Gate exam, college placements, NET exam, etc.
Training is, no doubt, one of the best parts of any induction into an organisation in which you get a lot of exposure & learning with the least liabilities. I’ll touch upon the highlights of it.
Accommodation-
We were accommodated for almost two months in Radisson Blu Hotel, Dwarka sector 13, New Delhi during our training period for two and a half months, which is a 5 Star hotel. We got superior rooms/ business class rooms. By the time I left, I knew every nook & corner of that hotel. For joining our training, we got 2nd AC train tickets/equivalent amount for Air travel, from our hometown to Delhi.
For our stay in Jalandhar, we were accommodated in country Inn& Suites by Radisson. Likewise, in Amritsar, there was comfort Inn hotel.
Radisson Blu Dwarka New Delhi
Country Inn & Suites by Radisson, Jalandhar
Comfort Inn Alstonia, Amritsar
Food-
Restaurants like Rice, Spring, etc. provided a wide variety of cuisines from Italian to American favorites. Even after two months of my stay, we couldn’t taste everything! The food was never a problem at every place we visited. There was a special class on dining etiquette also as part of our training module.
Training modules-
We were inducted into Common Corporate Induction Module (CCIM) after joining, in which a mixed group of Probationary Officers (POs) from every department like engineering, MBA, BSc/MSc, etc., was formed. This module involves ice breaking and team activities, mostly engaging every one of us in some part, which helped in getting to know each others better and encouraging team spirit. It also involves morning compulsory yoga sessions, personality development classes and various leadership & managerial sessions.
At the end of 8–9 days of CCIM, POs are divided for three different departments of Indian Oil i.e. Marketing, Pipeline and Refineries. The officer once inducted in anyone of them will remain in that department only for their remaining service. Who will get which department is dependent on a number of factors like interview remarks, experience, positions taken in school/college and CCIM reviews. I got marketing, so we went through Marketing induction module (MIM) following CCIM.
Marketing department in IOCL is a vast department which further divides into Aviation, Retail sales, LPG sales, Engineering, Terminals, LPG Bottling plants, Lube sales, etc. Likewise, the officers posted will be called Aviation officers, sales officers, engineering officers, operations officers and so on.
MIM consists of both theoretical and field training parts. Field training is the much-awaited part of any training as you visit a lot of places and have a hands-on experience on a lot of things. It is a comprehensive training where 1 week is given to each department of marketing. We first went to Jalandhar city for 2 weeks to visit the Oil Terminal and LPG Bottling plant (Pictures attached).
Indian Oil Jalandhar terminal
Indane bottling plant (Picture of Jalandhar’s plant is not available)
Then we were taken to Amritsar AFSto introduce us to the aviation department and their workings.
…taking a small food break ;)
We went to COCO (Company owned Company operated) pumps, which are Indian Oil owned pumps and franchise owned pumps, in Delhi, for understanding the basic functioning of petrol pumps and various schemes related to them. This part and the following part of LPG distribution involved major public interactions.
As a part of understanding LPG distribution system, we went to different Indane distributors and visited households of the area to interact with them, tell them about the basic safety measures, aware them about their rights as a customer, note down the complaints, if any. Also, we did random inspection on LPG cylinder trucks, distributor’s Indane godown of cylinders and on the spot checking of cylinders carried by delivery personnel.
Door to door interaction with Indane customer
Safety clinic, LPG awareness program
Roadside random checking of Indane cylinders
Checking of LPG cylinders at distributor’s end
Indian Oil also has a Lube brand, called Servo. We went to a lube blending plant at Asaoti, Haryana.
Over this entire two & a half months training, everything including accommodation, inter-state and intrastate travel by road/rail/air, food is covered by Indian Oil. In between our training we visited local places like Golden temple, Wagah-Attari border, Jalliawala bagh, local market & Chandigarh too. In addition to this, Full salary (as applicable) was paid to us. Additional perks like phone & laptop reimbursement is applicable from day 1. After joining, furniture, mobile bill reimbursement, suitcase reimbursement, etc., are applicable. Also Loans for four-wheeler/two-wheeler can be applied for. It has one of the best medical facilities in the country.
Indian Oil has almost everything that an employee wants to lead a decent life. The initial 3 months, after job posting, are part of On Job Training (OJT). I enjoyed each and every moment I spent in Indian Oil, during my training as well as during my service. It is a Fortune Global 500company which is not only working in upstream & downstream but also coming in midstream market. It has long term sustainable goals with state-of-the-art R&D facilities located in Faridabad, Haryana which is working on renewable Fuels.
