8 things you need to keep in mind to successfully clear IIT JEE Pratik Tale, IIT roorkee writes: I spend two years of my life preparing for a life determining exam (truth be told, it is not but that’s besides the point). In retrospect, following things helped me. 1. Screw the motivation. It fades away. Go for the discipline. You should use motivation to get into discipline. It is the marathon, it is not sprint. 2. Play to your strength. Know your strength and weakness. While preparing for JEE, I loved math and hated inorganic chemistry. In preparation and during exams I will give appropriate time to those subjects. I knew I could never study during the evening so I opted for evening coaching, where I will be forced to be productive. 3. Love what you do. If you haven’t enjoyed the path, destination will not give you any satisfaction. 4. It is gonna be hard. It winning were easy, even losers would have done it. No body said it will be easy but it will be worth it. 5. Have clear goal. If somebody had asked me why I wanted to go to IIT, I would have told – because I want to earn money. It is ironic that I am writing this as ex-software engineer who now works on 1/6th of previous salary. The point being — you could have silly goals but you should have one. It might change over the time. But at every time you should know where you are headed. 6. Performance oriented milestones. Have performance oriented milestones rather than achievement oriented milestones. Let me explain the difference — “I want to score < 100 rank in coming test” is achievement oriented milestone. What can you do if there are 120 super brilliant students appearing for the test? Such kind of goals will choke you. Rather have goals like — “I want to work on an average 8 hours a day for next three weeks”. You are excelling yourself without competing. 7. Butterfly effect. The butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial condition in which a small change can result in large differences in a later state. You are in the initial condition of your new life where butterfly effect is very prominent. Hour of extra work now will matter more than days work 10 years down the line. Please note that I am not undermining “live in the moment attitude”. But there comes phase in life when you have to put your tooth and nails to the fight. For you, now is that moment. 8. Do your best. There are lot of external factors which plays role in the final outcome. But if you have done your best, you could always be content with your performance. Best of luck
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 08:02:00 +0000