We are used to being very anxious about everything. We should accumulate strength for the college entrance examination when we are just in high school. We couldn't wait to see the three-year simulation of the five-year college entrance examination when we were in the first year of high school.
So this inertia is transferred to universities, and many people set up a banner fluttering in the wind every year like making plans. However, how can a person who has not studied in a university imagine a university? Nothing more than that, I want to be a student cadre, the backbone of a society, the top GPA, a scholarship, a graduate school, or a rattan school abroad.
However, these are too vague space spirits. When you open the advanced mathematics book in your freshman year and are obsessed with differential integral, you will often forget those vague things and only think about how to survive the final exam of this semester.
So after I got the report card of the first semester of last semester, I didn't feel very satisfied and wanted to do something next year. Who knows that the second semester is relentlessly repeating what happened last semester.
So we will all start to fall into a state of confusion and mindlessness in our sophomore and junior years, and fall into a strange circle of semi-comfort zone. Why can it be said to be half comfortable? Because, on the one hand, we feel that we are very adapted to repeating this kind of life, and most things are predictable. On the other hand, we are also dissatisfied with this state and want to be better, but it is difficult to come up with really effective ways to get out of this strange circle. So I soon found that I was going to face the problem of graduation. Just like that short and tight song, you always say that graduation is far away, and then I go my separate ways.
Why is this happening? Because before we go through an independent and complete practice, we can't know where our limitations as an ordinary person are, and we don't know what our real self is like.
We can't help feeling good about ourselves. Just like that famous questionnaire survey, 90% drivers think their driving skills are above average, and 90% people think their looks are above average.
You never know where the boundary of your true ability lies, unless you throw yourself into a real and cruel arena to test, so we always make one wonderful plan after another, and then miss all the plans perfectly again and again through procrastination, anxiety, coping syndrome and other reasons.
Before making a plan, we all feel that we can accomplish these things, and we all feel that we have to force ourselves, and then we silently scold ourselves when we do it, saying that no one can do so much. Just like in the afternoon, we will feel that we have to finish reading this book in the evening, even if we stay up late. How can there be so much sleep! I also use the phrase "I will sleep after death" to motivate myself. Then after three o'clock in the middle of the night, when infinite drowsiness strikes, I feel desperate at the thought of getting up at seven o'clock the next day, especially when the alarm clock rings in the morning, and I can't wait to strangle myself who made the decision to stay up late the afternoon before.
So Bill Gates' statement is very reasonable, that is, "We always overestimate the changes in the next year or two and underestimate the possible changes in the next decade."
All this is caused by our mentality of "Time waits for no man", "Seize the day" and "insatiable greed". We always feel that it takes five years to see some effects, which is too slow. At the beginning of the new year, if you want to do a lot of things in the next year, doing a lot of things means doing everything, and then doing nothing, doing nothing.
I believe that many people spend their college life in such a tangled, contradictory and chaotic cycle. It seems that we did a lot of things, but afterwards it seems that we did nothing.
When I graduated from my Ph.D., I looked back on my ten-year study career and found that I didn't seem to do anything. Fortunately, I still have a decent undergraduate and doctoral degree to explain this decade, and this explanation seems so mediocre and boring. The most shocking idea at that moment was that there were still two degrees endorsed by me in the past ten years. When you graduate without a degree, you can go through a stable stage.
So, if I go to college again, I want to tell myself, don't worry, don't be greedy, take your time, have a clear expectation of what I want to achieve in four years, and then think about what I can do now, don't be greedy. It is not easy for you to do well in college for four years.