This may not initially make sense as a study tip, but bear with me... Studying for your classes, reviewing the day's material, memorizing, and learning to apply your new knowledge are the only way to truly excel in college, and if you fail to do this you will likely just be "getting by" or even failing before long. But I urge you to also make some time to do the things you love. If you do nothing but eat, sleep, and study, sooner or later you are going to burn out. Yes, for a while you will be on top of the world, doing wonderfully in all your classes and gaining praise from your family and friends... but after a while the joy of doing well academically will start to fade. It may happen quickly, during even the first semester, or it may happen much later as a senior or graduate student, but when the regret and resentment starts to set in, it can drain all the joy right out of your life. I have seen this play out in two ways:
1. You get so tired of always studying and missing out on doing the things you used to love to do, that you just up and stop studying altogether and go on a fun binge that you may or may not ever come back from. This seems to happen to people at the worst times too, like exam week. The pressure they place on themselves and the expectations their family and loved ones have becomes too much and they simply have to escape it all for a while. This can have dramatically damaging effects on your grades and your mental state, leaving you wondering why you ever started down this path in the first place. You are then unable to succeed, and only get half of what we are all looking for from college; a life we enjoy, but without success you can't fully enjoy your life because you are always having to worry about how to get by and just survive living paycheck to paycheck. Or...
2. The pressure and expectations placed on you by yourself and those you love gets so high that you almost can't take it anymore. You miss enjoying life the way you used to, and you wonder what is the point of all this if I am not able to enjoy my life and be happy? But instead of cracking and just going off on a fun binge, you refuse to let down the ones you love and simply push through, and you continue to do this throughout the rest of your college and professional career. You are a great success, but there is no real joy in your life, and you still end up with only half of what we are all looking for; success, but you are unable to enjoy being successful because you have trained yourself to abstain from enjoyable activities for fear that you will become distracted and lose all you have worked for.
In either case, you are only able to get part of what you desire out of life. So my point here is that a big part of college is being able to balance different aspects of your life, and be diligent about studying, but also make time for the things you enjoy. You can't always do the fun stuff, but you shouldn't cut it out of your life either. By taking some time every week, say, one day of the weekend and committing part of that day to doing whatever it is that makes you happy, you will be able to go back to studying the next day feeling refreshed and recharged. You will realize that while you are studying in order to one day be successful, the whole reason you want to be successful is so that you can enjoy and get the most out of life. With this kind of balance in your life, you will be a much happier and more energetic person, and you will bring joy to yourself and all those around you. You won't be resentful of others when you see or hear of them having fun, and you can simply smile and get back into what you are studying, remembering that you are going to be doing something you really enjoy soon too.
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