Guseyn Zarbaliyev, Period 2, 01/06/2023

Atomic Habits and Growth

● At this current point in time, what specific standards have you set for yourself?
● How and why did you come to craft these standards?
● How do you demonstrate resilience toward achieving these standards?
● How do you assess yourself?
● What adjustments do you make? How often?

As high school draws to a close, and the workload has lightened, I have come to realize
many of my internal flaws due to the time I've had to self-introspect. From my chats with my
therapist and those long nights left awake thinking, my flaws have risen above my strengths,
utterly outweighing them. There are many aspects of myself I wish to improve, both physical and
mental. From losing more weight to gaining a generally healthier mindset - I want to change, and
my current largest weakness is my horrendous work ethic. It's blatant that I’m a terrible
procrastinator. I stay awake until 3-4 am to get all my work done, then pass out once I get home,
creating a terrible self-fulfilling cycle of degeneracy. I try and cope with it by powering through
with tea and energy drinks, but the artificial sustenance is catching up to my body. But the key
thing causing this insomniac cycle is my tendency to brush off work that isn't due the next day.
Just a few days ago, I left a month of work to do in one day. I forced myself to go to one of my
friend's houses, to prevent my procrastination. I wouldn't be able to fall asleep or procrastinate in
any way at their house. It was the only course of action to get the giant pile of work completed.
I intend to keep up this habit of working alongside my friend, or at least outside of my
house or room. In my room, there's so much to do besides work. Reorganizing and cleaning my
shelves for the fifth time, playing video games, sleeping, or anything else but work. With the aid
of my friend, we both work on our own projects, keeping each other in check, and making sure
we are on track. Even just working at Starbucks - the setting just leaves me more motivated to
get my work done and get home.

But this is only a temporary solution. A priority of mine is to finally completely crush
this bad habit. It's simply a fact of mind over matter, and before I enter college and the course
work only becomes more overbearing, I need to develop a healthier work ethic to prevent
burnout and unnecessary stress - and to also produce the best work I possibly can for myself. I
need to overcome this before it starts to affect all facets of my life. Currently, I’ve been able to
maintain my social life, but it’s more often that I find myself declining invitations to hang out
with my closest friends, simply because I am too tired - or have too much work to do since I left
everything for the weekend.

There also comes the problem of sectioning or chunking my work. I often do work in
large blocks and leave studying to the last moment. While I do fine on most of my exams, most
of what I studied slips away once I hand in that paper. There were points when I would forget the
entire Units that I studied. Ironically, it was studying late at night for my Psychology exam that I
learned why this is, the premise known as retroactive interference, when old information that has
already been encoded is disrupted and forgotten due to the addition of new information.

I’ve always loved learning, from history to computer science. All of these experiences
have led me to the realization that I want to become a better learner overall. I want to understand
and truly comprehend the material that I am studying, and not just memorize it for the sake of
passing exams. In order to achieve this goal, I know that I need to develop a healthier work ethic
and a better study routine. I also intend to continue working alongside my friend and working in
different environments to keep myself motivated and productive.