3 Life Lessons I Learnt From Solving a Ton Of Problems During a Drop Year

And am still learning new ones.

After the completion of my school, I took a drop year to prepare for JEE, for which I went to Kota, a city in Rajasthan, also known as the Coaching Capital of India.

Though life there taught me a lot of life-changing lessons, one thing that I learned and can be useful to everyone is what goes through the mind and the body while solving a lot of problems for cracking an exam.

These lessons can be applied in any field of life, and with no further due, let’s start with the lessons.

Everything’s a problem

Every scenario you are present in can be considered as a problem, depending on which you need to derive a solution that should be optimal and easy to implement.

Suppose you are going to the gym, then the question can be “I’ve trained my push movements yesterday, so my chest, triceps, and shoulders are sore today, moreover, the gym is quite crowded today, which part should I train now?”

The answer can be formed as “Okay, I can’t train my push movements but I can train my pull movements and legs as well. But I can see that the gym is quite crowded today so I should train the part that needs minimal equipment, and that leaves me with legs, so I’ll train my legs today.” Your answer may vary according to your needs.

Did you find anything similar to those which you used to solve in your teenage?

I analyzed the problem, it says that I can’t train my back, and the gym is crowded so I need to find a way so that I train in the minimum time possible, i.e., I must need minimum equipment, so I trained legs.

And that’s just one example, we always encounter such scenarios now and then and get stuck, but they are all similar to the problems we used to solve in our teenage.

So you see, solving problems during teenage wasn’t just for tackling exam questions, it built our mind so that we can try to find the optimal solutions to our life problems minimally.

Maybe a little bit late, but I’ve now realized that those problems on integration, differentiation, kinematics, and rotation, about which we used to ask our teachers, “How are they going to help us in the future?” are not just for the sake of clearing the JEE Mains and JEE Advanced exams, they have the potential to build us up a legit real-life problem solver.

Time Under Tension

One day, when I was preparing for JEE, it happened that there was one physics problem which only I was able to solve at that time.

This incident taught me one very important lesson in my life.

Competition has the power to make the nearest-looking feat the farthest.

I undoubtedly think that I wasn’t the only one to have the potential to solve that problem in the entire hostel, I surely wasn’t, but the problem with every one of them was they were solving problems in a time-bounded manner, i.e., 10-15 minutes, solved or done.

But I didn’t use to solve problems like that back then, so for me, the competition wasn’t as tough as they had, so I was able to solve that problem after investing 1–2 hours on that question, which made me the only one to solve that problem in the entire hostel.

I am not saying that competition is a bad thing, it is a great way to level yourself up if used wisely, but exploring new and rewarding fields with lesser competition must always be running in the back of your head.

Look around yourself, many successful people are successful because they developed the skill required for a new-in-market, rewarding alternative to the mob mentality, and with less competition.

Don’t lose seriousness to stress

In my opinion, there’s a very fine line between seriousness and stress. Many times it happened to me that I got serious about a problem to such an extent that I even skipped lunch or dinner, and I don’t think that’s the right thing to do.

In fact, many times I even stayed awake till 1 or 2 in the mid-night despite knowing the fact that I need to attend the lecture at 7 AM. Don’t you think these things had the potential to affect me badly? Surely, I got good at problem-solving, but at what cost?

I don’t think those activities are too far from what a person does while under stress. I was sleeping 4–5 hrs a day, skipping meals, getting angry for no reason, frustrated, and whatnot. I can easily say, at least now, that I wasn’t able to see that fine line between stress and seriousness, and every day I was standing at the brink of seriousness, ready to fall into stress anytime.

You won’t know, if you won’t want to know, when your seriousness became your stress.

The Takeaway

• You come across new problems every single day, getting better in problem-solving in exams as well as in real life can be of utmost use.
• Competition has the power to make the nearest-looking feat the farthest. So make sure you keep your calm and always stay in search of new, in-demand, and rewarding fields with less competition.
• Always know where you’re standing in your mind. You would never know if not paid attention when your seriousness became your stress.

So those were 3 life-lessons that I learned just by sitting at a place, solving a ton of questions, and getting stressed. I hope you liked it and learned something new.

Thanks for reading!!

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