Tag: Lessons

Lessons From a Fourth Year

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Wake up Early… EVERYDAY

Stop complaining that there are not enough hours in the day when you are sleeping through the two or three most important! I have learned that knocking out the hardest tasks of the day before noon makes for a much better day.

Take B12

This stuff is literally a miracle. A B12 and a cup of coffee will make even the busiest day seem conquerable.

Save Naps for Rainy Sundays

I cannot say that I believe those Buzzfeed posts about nappers being more successful. Successful people know what they need to do and they get it done, without sleeping in between.

Only Wing it if You’re Good at It

Vague, I know, but winging-it is a true art. There are people who can get away with a client pitch with no research, but most of us are not Don Draper so I have learned that it’s better to be overprepared than sorry.

Download a text editor

I use Grammarly. It makes emails to professors and research papers a lot less of a threat.

Stop Giving People Your High School Email Account

Sorry naticus93, you are now demoted to retail store notifications.

Networking is not Just for Seniors

Do NOT, I repeat, do NOT wait until senior year to start networking. Build strong, professional relationships, go to events, reach out and ask questions – it will make job searching a lot less stressful when you finally roll around to it.

Ignore FOMO

On any given night you will have around 6,000 options to participate in, and sometimes you’re not going to do a single one of them, or sometimes you simply can’t. It is okay. There will always be more, and you will have a lot more misery thinking about the things you didn’t go to than the actual missing out on them.

Competition should inspire you, not threaten you

Why do we get so upset when other people find success? There is room for all of us to be successful, and frankly, I would rather have friends in high places down the road.

It is okay to not know exactly what it is that you love yet

It took me three majors and a lot of soul searching – to still not even know what my calling is yet. But I am closer and I have tried out a lot of things and I have gotten pretty good at some of them, so I’m learning to enjoy the ride.

Actually do things that scare you

Whether that is applying to an internship that is coveted or going on a study abroad all alone in a place you know nothing about – you will almost never regret it.

Make Decisions for YOU

I spent far too much time making my life decisions for other people, and for a while that meant living a life that was not my own. Sure you need to reach out for advice and wisdom, but make decisions for you. As I have reminded my Gamma Chi girls upwards of one million times, “YOU have to live the life that you make, not the people you are letting make it for you.”

 

 

Suspended in a Sunbeam

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“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” -Carl Sagan

Feeling small is an incredible blessing.

Recently I had the overwhelming joy of experiencing this on one of the largest scales imaginable with a short trip to the Grand Canyon. It was on this too-short voyage that I was humbled in a way that I don’t think I have ever experienced before.

So much of our society is pounding us relentlessly to be obscenely large in our self obsession, to occupy time and space in the biggest ways imaginable. That identity is found in grandeur of oneself.

But standing in the Grand Canyon, looking over the entirety of earth’s history, you learn just the opposite. Identity is found when you feel incredibly small. Identity is found in the humility that we are just an infinitely minute part of the universe. Identify is found when you put it all in perspective.

This is not to be mistaken for insignificance. Just the opposite. This identity is found when you recognize that you were created as part of the infinitely long, magically complex human story for a very specific reason.

Like strokes in a Monet. We are not meant to be large, we are not meant to be enough all on our own. We are meant to be intertwined, blended, saturated, and morphed. We are not meant to be seen as a stroke, we are meant to be viewed as a work of art. We are meant to be seen from a step back, meant to be seen from a place of perspective. The beauty of our kind is we we have a boundlessly talented artist putting each of us exactly where we are supposed to be. An artist whose masterpiece can only work when all of us realize our destiny.

A destiny to be small, yes, but more than that a destiny to be part of a masterpiece.