Eugene Jiang, Period 7, 12/16/22

 Atomic Habits and Growth

Let’s just say that the covid-19 pandemic, or more so the quarantine, has not done wonders for my personal habits. I, like many others, was one of the many students that barely paid attention in class during online courses. I’m not proud of it, but when I am sitting in front of my computer I would rather be playing video games than be doing classwork. To add onto that, the pandemic lasted for around a year and a half and that was plenty of time for a series of bad habits to develop. Since most teachers decided to lay back on the workload during the pandemic, I got used to just doing the bare minimum amount of work required to get by and that resulted in my confidence after returning to school in the Junior year to be low. I decided to take relatively easy classes for my Junior year as I wasn’t sure if I’d be capable of passing harder classes like AP Calc BC when I literally didn’t pay attention at all in the other math classes. Unfortunately, it turns out that I went a little too easy on myself because I ended up being able to coast through my junior year with minimal effort just like in the pandemic. Don’t get me wrong, the GPA boost from my junior year was really nice, but,at the same time, it was yet another year of doing nothing other than developing bad habits and I knew that it wasn’t sustainable. At some point I am going to hit a wall that I can’t get past by just coasting along and that point is most likely going to be in college.

Naturally, I had to do something about my habits so I decided to crack down on myself in my senior year with more challenging courses in order to force myself to put more effort into schoolwork. As to how that worked out, it didn’t seem to be working because I was still coasting through at the start of my senior year until recently. I got hit by a whole lot of work in the past 2 weeks and they have all been a wake up call for me. First came an AP Gov test which I didn’t do well on because I don’t pay attention in class. Then came an AP Calc test that I probably failed because I didn’t pay attention in class, yeah there seems to be a pattern there I know. Then there’s all the work that I’m getting from Mythology, which thankfully I’m not failing yet, but I probably did fail the reflection. To top it all off, I have my decision from John Hopkins coming tomorrow, the same date that this blog is due, and I’m probably being rejected from that too. Not the greatest situation to be in, but it certainly is the wake up call that I’m looking for. Hopefully this will be enough to make me stop being a lazy bum, but sometimes old habits die hard. All I can do is be optimistic and time will tell.