Impress yourself and you'll astound others
#89 - back to school and back to busy
Hi there,
This first half term of 7 weeks to start Year 13 is reputed to be busy. I can confirm as we’re a week in that it certainly is. 2 tests done and 2 more in the week coming, revision has invaded my study time already, with mock exams more than 4 months away. All this while moving swiftly with my university application and entrance exam preparation.
Beyond school, I’ve enjoyed getting back to music with rehearsals on Friday, watching a couple of films (Jawan and Thunivu, which has had a mention here before) and being around friends again.
Highlight of the week: can I be honest with you? My Friday afternoon lunch. Fish, chips, garden peas, curry sauce along with a chocolate brownie in custard, all for £2.20 😋. I went to Further Maths with a full stomach, fuel that carried me all the way home 👍
The life of a School Captain, I’ve found, is littered with meetings about all sorts of things, especially at the start of the year. My diary shows topics including a charity fun run, creating a new officer role, preparing sports reports and creating a duty rota for lunchtimes.
One of the meetings this week was with four Year 12s who got 10 Grade 9s; I wanted them to replicate a ‘Student Secrets to GCSE Success’ guide we made for their year group in 2022, hoping to have a better version to give to this year’s Year 11.
Sat in my Physics classroom a few minutes before, trying to make sense of electric fields, I thought about how I hadn’t thought about or written down bullet points of topics I wanted to mention, which I’ve found is a crucial step in making an effective, efficient and ‘get things done’ meeting.
I could’ve just winged it and improvised: after all, I would’ve knew roughly what I wanted to say to them, which was “well done, here’s my idea, what do you think, let’s create a timeline, any questions?”. But spending a moment to write these down allowed me to have the clarity to enter the meeting with purpose and focus on what I needed to say to them.
As I was debating whether I needed to prepare, a dialogue ran in my head.
“They are only Year 12s who will not have much to do this early in the year, they’ll be glad to get the chance to chat to the School Captains1”
“This is probably their only meeting this week, as opposed to one of multiple for you. If you were in their position, you would’ve been excited to have this opportunity and come with enthusiasm. They’re giving up their time to do something *you* want them to so treat them with high respect.”
Hmm, quite a set of thoughts for a seemingly little decision. It served as a reminder of 3 core principles:
Treat others how you would like to be treated - if last year’s school captain called me for a meeting during my break time and rambled on, I wouldn’t be too pleased. The same applies here.
Whatever you do, do it properly - one of Mum’s favourite lines when I don’t quite put away all of the dishes.
Behave in a way that you’d be impressed by - this is the one I want to explore in greater detail today.
We spend so much of our lives trying to impress others, as I wrote about in this post below. Likewise, there are others’ traits and actions that make us excited or even jealous, things that we wish we were able to do or were intelligent/disciplined/enter positive adjective enough to have done. You can use this to your advantage to ‘hack’ your brain into doing those things that make you stand out.
An example - when I went on the HSBC work experience in-person days, I thought to myself, “What would someone who was making the most of today do?”2 They would try to meet someone new (I messaged a couple of people on LinkedIn). Another thing they could do is show their CV to them, especially if you were working with the recruitment team for the day (which I luckily was).
I ended up showing my CV to one of their hiring managers who picked it apart. His boss remarked as he was looking through, “10 out of 10 for the initiative” - we’ve struck gold, impressing someone and getting personal gain of a better CV.
It can almost be thought of as a regret minimisation tool to know that you’ve succeeded at doing your best. At the same time, thinking in this way makes you naturally stand out because you’ve shifted your focus from ‘what would impress them’ to ‘what would an impressive person do?', a subtle change - from the output to the input.
When you want to work out how you could maximise your upside or think about how you upgrade your thoughts or actions, consider “What would I be impressed by? What would someone have to do to make me go, “Jeez, this guy is impressive. He’s going places”?
Podcast of the week 🎙️
WSJ’s The Future of Everything: Real or AI? The Tech Giants Racing to Stop the Spread of Fake Images
The rise of AI isn’t just in the text world of ChatGPT but also with images; this episode talks about the dangers of image-generating AI and how to tackle the issue
Article of the week 📰
You Can Handle Much More Than You Think by
A motivating thought and one that reminds me of a quote I’ve found myself coming back to lately - “At every stage of our lives we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we’re going to become, and then when we become those people, we’re not always thrilled with the decisions we made”. You’ll change and adapt to the challenge; trust in this and take the plunge.
Quote of the week 💬
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. - Aristotle
As you embark upon a new week, impress yourself and you’ll both be proud and achieve some pretty cool stuff.
Adi
This may come across as narcissistic - I’m trying to be honest and lay my thoughts out bare.
Notice the de-personalisation. That immediately takes you out of your life and makes you visualise you being sat in a room as you watch someone do something that makes you feel lesser and makes them seem better than you.