The Ability to Recover

I approve this message

Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is the importance of pushing yourself. I was the stereotypical "smart" kid in high school in that I didn't have to try very hard. Getting good grades was easy, but after a while it became monotonous and I lost interest. I still got decent grades but  I never felt a sense of accomplishment. I coasted through freshman and sophomore year, getting Bs and maybe one or two As. I don't remember when exactly it changed changed, but junior and senior year I started becoming useful again and improved my grades dramatically. I think a lot of it had to do with me discovering weight-training. I was always fairly overweight as a child, but one day I discovered www.t-nation.com and it sparked a passion for iron that has not yet gone out, and probably never will. As I learned to push myself in the gym, I remembered the joys of pushing myself intellectually; I never really enjoyed the busy work that we were frequently assigned but I saw the fun in engaging in class discussions and essays.

I was not however, as bad as this

For whatever reason, I lost this sense of challenge when I began college. I returned to my old coasty ways, and did as little as possible to maintain average grades. But, as history likes to repeat itself I got my act together junior and senior year. The most notable example of this is that between summer and this past semester I've probably done more work than the rest of my college career combined. Over summer I was working 40+ hours a week and taking 15 credits, in the fall I was working two jobs taking 5 English classes, and part of two clubs. Now, I bring all this up not to show off (which is hard considering no one is following the blog yet) but mostly to elucidate my point. In the gym, there's a certain amount of effort you need to invest before you begin to see results. You can be in there faffing about on the ab machine and texting the entire time and you'll never make progress. But if you get in there and bust your ass then you begin to become better, and I've found that the same is true for the intellectual side of things. I wasn't making progress because I wasn't challenging myself, but when I finally decided to throw myself into my academic life I flourished. My workload kept getting heavier and heavier, but I kept getting stronger and stronger. In short, if you have nothing to recover from, you'll never make progress.

Male or female, this is the equivalent
of sleeping on a book hoping to absorb its powers