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Thursday, January 2, 2014

Juggling Priorities - Reflections for the New Year


During high school and university, I've had classmates that seemed to be multitalented. It seemed as though there wasn't anything they couldn't do – while consistently maintaining a high GPA in a difficult major with a full course load, they also managed to find the time to participate in a senior role in student government and as an executive member in numerous student clubs/organizations , volunteer at the hospital, conduct research on multiple projects in their department, hold onto a part-time job or two and have enough time to party.

I will admit that I've tried to emulate these outstanding peers of mine, but it was a constant juggling act which bought me only a fleeting sense of happiness. It also meant sacrificing quality over quantity or just time to chill out and relax.

This blog is called “The Aspiring Polymath”. I had a lot of goals in mind when I first started this blog – improve my language skills (French, Chinese), learning a programming language, picking up a dead language (Latin, Egyptian hieroglyphs), brainstorming ideas for a novel, getting my name on as many peer-reviewed articles as I can in my field, finishing some of my licensing exams...all this on top of a full course load along with volunteering and some extracurriculars.

In hindsight, I'm not sure if I was just overly ambitious or merely exhibiting signs of delusional thinking.
    
Somewhere I lost sight of the forest for the trees because in attempting to do too much at once, I actually ended up making less progress overall.

Therefore, my goal for 2014 is simply this: Do less but do it well.  

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