You show up on day-1 of the semester and get an hour’s worth of forecast about the upcoming month of tests, quizzes, papers, and required reading.
FUN
From that first day onward, your relationship with the class and the subject it’s about shifts. At some point, you start focusing on the grade book more than the textbook, and you see the professor more as a puzzle to figure out than a person to engage with.
This is the point where learning is replaced with performing.
We’ve all been there.
It makes sense how it happens. You want to get the degree you’re there for. You can only get it by doing well in your classes. You care about performing well in your class because it is the means by which you can accomplish your goal.
The problem is that four years of figuring out how to perform well in classes doesn’t necessarily prepare you to perform well in a post-college context. And for most people, getting a degree is intended to help them find work, purpose, and fulfillment after graduating.
The solution to this problem is to transform your academic experience from one focused solely on performance to one focused on learning. We still use performance as a metric of how well we understand specific topics, but we reframe our thoughts to be centered on the goal of learning a subject instead of performing well in a class.
Here’s why this is valuable:
- Failure is part of learning. While we want to perform well all the time, we also acknowledge that sometimes we will make mistakes and fail. That takes some of the performative pressure off of ourselves.
- Learning is transferable. While a grade doesn’t mean much outside of that class or academia more broadly, actual learning can have infinite connections, overlaps, and transferences with other aspects of your life going forward.
- Learning is more fun. The learning process is often creative, playful, and fun. When we give ourselves the space to learn, we enrich our overall wellness.
That’s all for today. As you reflect on this article, I invite you to consider how the dichotomy of learning and performing has been playing out in your life lately. It’s never too late to recharge your study life with a fresh mindset.