Beginning of College’s End

Evolution of my Blog

I have not posted anything for the last few weeks because I’ve been getting ready for school and thinking about things. I have decided to change a few things about this blog and give an update on my life. Before, I was trying to hard to blog about something that would have some form of value to others. In my opinion, this was actually taking away value because even though I always believed in what I wrote, I didn’t always write what I believed. As a result, this blog will become more of a journal about my personal life with my experiences of self-improvement and wealth creation woven in – not the other way around.

Life

It is sad that I feel this way now that I am in my last year of college but I am making an effort to live in the moment and enjoy what the people and opportunities around me have to offer. As a matter of fact, I have started setting aside a day on the weekend and an hour each day for myself to relax, have fun, or even do nothing. As a matter of fact, today I floated down the peaceful Itchetucknee River with some Hartman boys (Steven F, Kyle M, Jon H, Paul T, and Zach H though Zach left at the Midway Point to go to the library to study). We left at 8am, floated some, ate our packed lunch at the midway point, and got back in to float until 4 pm or so. When we got home, we had our first dinner (spaghetti) made by our cook crews at Hartman and then some of the upstairs guys (who also went on the river) chatted until 1 am about relationships and exciting things that we wanted to do in the future.

Scheduling & Organization

With school in session, having “me” time will become difficult at times but I have made a semi-flexible schedule centered around my workouts, judo, and school to more easily visualize what I have to work with concerning free time.* Unfortunately, it is not much. In addition, on my ancient Blackberry 7290, I have made 2 tasks “Study” and “Errands” to keep me on top of my studies and what I need to do. In “Study,” I have included all my classes in the notes section and I enter my homework next to each class. In “Errands,” I have included all the little things I need to do such as grocery shopping, treasurer duties for SSF, writing a monthly email, and so on. Also, though I had high hopes for polyphasic sleep, I decided not to do it because of my rigorous workout schedule. This is especially important since sleep is needed for injury and muscle recovery so I will try to sleep about 7-8 hours of sleep per night.

*If you click on the picture of my weekly schedule on the left, you can see what my week looks like more clearly.

Massage

Yesterday I gave a hour massage to Paul T – my first fully paid massage. I hope to put up my massage website up by the end of this week.

School

Since I put myself down as pre-med in my freshman year, the advisors for my business administration major decided without asking me that my specialization would be Chemistry. This means that I need to take Analytical Chemistry with lab to graduate. Oh fun. It’s funny since now that I’ve finished all my pre-med requirements, I’ve decided that I probably will not go on to medical school. I am hoping that maybe it won’t be as tough or boring as it sounds. We’ll see.

On the other hand, the other classes I am taking I am extremely stoked about. One of them is Anatomy, which will be a great review of what I know as well as provide more depth and detail in my understanding of the human body. Another class is 19th century Intellectual and Cultural Movements in Europe, which will go into detail of many of the thinkers of the time – something I find very interesting. My last class is Introduction to the Design of Architectural Interiors, which is an interior design class. Our teacher Dr. P has already assigned us a project in which we pick a place to analyze. I am turning in what I wrote on Wednesday. We will see what she has to say.

My Learning Process: Waves

Learning is very important to me and I enjoy doing it. Though I tend to learn better by doing, learning from books are a large part of my life especially during my college years. Now I have a confession. For the majority of college students including myself, book learning has often boiled down to waiting a few days before the test to study the information and forgetting it as we leave the testing site. I used to beat myself over forgetting information that I only used a few times but I now believe it’s a process that makes learning more efficient. We were meant to learn, forget, and relearn again as the next time is always easier. Besides, if we really need the information, our exposure to it will result in being able to remember it longer.

Since I have come to terms with that, a problem I’ve had is when I try to fit the large variety of my diverse interests (from Judo to cooking to photography) all into my schedule at the same time. This method mirrors time periods in high school where we had a subject an hour. While this structured type of learning gets more done, I find that I personally learn better in waves as once I’m on a roll learning about a subject, I don’t like to stop. Each wave puts me in a zone where I just soak up everything I read or watch about that subject for about a week or so. This depends on how many other interests I’m looking into at that time. I limit what I study to only a few per week to prevent myself from being bored and to keep the rate at which I absorb, understand, and process information high. Like everyone else, my efficiency drops as my motivation cools. In a few weeks, I will usually be as excited to learn about that particular subject as ever. For example, a couple weeks past, I had a home improvement obsession which I satisfied by taking notes on marathon viewings of HGTV every night. After a week, I didn’t have the same curious drive to learn about home improvement. Now I’m on my real estate phase with an occasional viewing of HGTV sprinkled in.

Though the possibilities are endless with so much to learn, my point is that instead of trying to change how I learn, I believe that it’s better to take advantage of how I learn best. In my case, I’m good at digesting a lot of information on the same subject for about a week until I burn out. Then I come back to the topic when I’m feel excited about that topic again, which usually takes a few weeks at most. This ongoing process is what works for me. What works for you?

Weber’s Partial List of Interesting Subjects

• traveling
• home improvement (landscaping, interior design, etc.)
• personal finance
• stock market
• real estate
• cooking & nutrition
• productivity
• judo
• relationships
• massage