It’s not a competition
Yet again, one simple sentence has started a whole set of cogs rolling in my brain.
“It’s not a competition”, said the tutor and my brain went ‘ping!’ I can’t even remember about what or to whom he said it, but, bloody hell, it hit me.
I realised that I did see school as some sort of competition with my classmates and I always had. I remember the competition with Chris Ellison in primary school – which one of us would be dux? I think I was rather disappointed that we won it jointly. Perhaps I’ve never got over it.
This unnecessary sense of competition explains part of my problem with Groupwork (cf a previous post of mine) and why I liked keeping my most important “insights” into a task to myself.
It’s stupid – it doesn’t matter how well I do in comparison to my classmates. (I hope?) I’m doing this degree not to prove myself better than other people, but to learn something for myself, to give myself direction, to find out what the fuck I want to do with my life. I need to focus on doing this degree for myself and not just to prove myself better than others.
I’m hoping this revelation will really change how I think about my studying.
