Realizing this changed my life (2023)

Introduction

social:
www.instagram.com/kay_h_cee/
twitter.com/kay_h_cee

Content

Realizing that I'm, not smart was probably one of the best things that happened to me.

So smart is a subjective term.

But if we look at a bell curve, most people are going to fall within the average territory.

And you might ask, why am I talking about this it's? Because I really believe that realizing this really transformed my work ethic and my entire outlook on life, but let me explain how I got to this point.

So when I was a kid, my dad would constantly tell me these stories about how he wasn't smart, but he was dedicated and anything in life.

He wanted to achieve.

He knew that if he put in the hours and the time he could do it, but I would always hear that and just kind of roll my eyes because for me, I didn't want to hear that I didn't want to work hard.

I wanted to be able to do as little work as possible and still get good grades in my test.

So that I could spend all my time playing video games or whatever.

So I went to a very particular high school known specifically for its academics.

This was definitely not your like run-of-the-mill high school.

So there's about 500 people in the senior class.

And the majority of the class is just like, ridiculously smart, most of the class would end up in like top colleges across america.

And I remember I would always be confused watching movies like mean, girls or whatever where high schools were separated into groups like the jocks, the cheerleaders.

Because instead everyone at my school was basically the same kind of person grouped up based on how smart they were.

So when I was in that high school, I was constantly surrounded by people that were smarter than me and I'm, not even talking about just in terms of test scores.

It was just very obvious and apparent just the level of intelligence.

Some of these people had I would study physics with my friends.

And some of them would just read over it in a few minutes and get the concept immediately.

Meanwhile, I'd be sitting over there rereading the concept for hours without getting it.

So growing up in a community like this and with friends, like this you'll develop one of two mindsets, the first one being damn, my friends are so smart I'm gonna have to work so much harder to be like them or the second one.

Damn, my friends are so smart.

I can't be that far off from them.

I was definitely the latter the hard part came when I tried to mimic their behavior.

So when you're around people that have just a really high level of intelligence, they don't really act like people at other high schools.

Some of my friends would just study like 20 minutes before a test, and they get perfect scores.

Meanwhile, I try to do the same thing and I get like a c or like I fail to test for the longest time, even though I tried to mimic what my friends were doing.

I just couldn't achieve the same results.

But I always deluded myself into thinking that it wasn't because I wasn't smart, it was because I didn't try hard enough.

And if I did actually try, I would be on their same level for sure so about two and a half years out of college.

I was working in a startup, and I wasn't really happy about my position.

I really wanted a new job, but I would do interviews, and I would completely bond them because of the problems I had mentioned before I've done poorly in a lot of interviews in my life.

One sticks out specifically because I didn't even try.

This was a job that I really really wanted.

I was told by the recruiters to focus on javascript fundamentals.

And I probably wouldn't even be asked any actual coding questions, and I would do great.

If I just studied the concepts overall, I decided you know what this is going to be easy.

I have plenty of time to study and a few hours in the weekend should be good enough.

So I scheduled the interview on a monday morning.

So I would be able to study all weekend, and I ended up literally waiting until the last second.

I woke up at 6, a.m two hours before the interview to do my first bits of studying, can you guess how it went when I got the detailed feedback from my recruiter, his list of feedback was so long and so extensive and detailed? I must have been one of the worst candidates he ever interviewed.

And I just remember sitting there, right after the interview unhappy about my performance unhappy about the job I was currently at and unhappy about my future job, prospects.

And more importantly, I was just angry for letting myself put in such little effort into this whole thing.

And realizing that in the past 10 years, I hadn't changed my mindset at all my past self, always thought that when I was older, I was gonna try harder and then I'll be able to look back at all my high school years as kind of like a formative period, but would my past self be happy with my future self.

If they saw that, I was making the exact same mistakes.

It was definitely one of those moments where I realized nothing changes in life unless you make the change.

So you might ask what did thinking that I was smart have to do with any of this well for a long time, one of my biggest problems was that I wouldn't take other people's advice that seriously I would just assume that they didn't know what they were talking about and that their advice wouldn't apply to, you know, because I was smart, but failing all those interviews and coming to a point where I was getting well into my 20s really made me realize damn.

I don't think I'm, that's, smart and being lazy, isn't, really an excuse either.

And realizing that anything you want if it's something worth achieving is going to take time pain and effort.

And then full circle.

I thought about that advice from my dad that I had been ignoring for all those years about how he wasn't smart and that he was just dedicated towards his craft that's.

When it all really clicked improvement in life is all about slow, incremental change.

And what I wanted most in my life at that point was to advance my career and hoping to pass interviews by studying for like 10 minutes before and hoping that they would ask a question that I already studied before was completely crazy and unsustainable.

Everything.

I wanted in my life.

I had to actively point it out as a problem and figure out how to fix it.

So from my lack of social and interpersonal skills, I started to read books for my goal of getting into a large tech company.

I started to plan out a schedule of how I would study for these technical interviews and get into the companies.

And I went online and looked for research from other people who had went with the same process.

So I could follow their mistakes and their techniques, and I would never ignore advice because I thought I was smarter than other people because chances are I wasn't.