/improve/ - Self Improvement

you should've spent that 5 years playing dota and go pro

>>4579

For day to day handling of setbacks, don't be self critical of yourself. Beating yourself over your failures is not a good strategy. It's another one of those self improvement misconceptions. And I know what some people may be thinking "If I'm not being critical of my mistakes, how will I keep myself in line?".

We're not little kids anymore, we don't need a parent screaming at us left and right to keep us in line. Your prefrontal cortex is not in its infancy like it was when you were a toddler, at your age, it's roughly halfway through development. So you don't need someone to boss you around for you to be able to get something done.

>Face adversity

>Fail or have setback

>Beat yourself up over it

>Stress yourself out in the process

>Resort to stress coping mechanisms, usually something you are trying to quit

A better strategy is to forgive yourself and to then reflect. By forgive I mean be your own support base, when you experience a failure or setback, imagine you being your own parent, specifically a parent who just witnessed their kid try their hardest at something and fail at it, and then end up sad. Console yourself. Don't mistake this for coddling yourself. You are simply reminding yourself that setbacks happen and that it's okay, because there is time left on the clock to fix it and that beating yourself up over it will only make things more difficult.

Once you're done, your conscious is clear and the stress over failing is gone. You can now approach and dissect what just happened and why with a calm mind. Reflect. Identify what happened, and what triggered it and how you can prevent it from happening again. Journal all of this infact.

>>4579

I don't know if you're still here or if you'll ever read this but don't kill yourself over these things. They're common problem.

High School sucks at pretty much everything. One, because we're snot nosed brats when we're there, and two, the government methods aren't the greatest.

So long as you paid attention you can study math on your own and get it much faster because you'll be able to conceptualize it better since you already have it lodged inside your head for the most part.

khanacademy.org

Start there. Sal is education Jesus and will save us all. Also, you're 18, you still haven't even touched your 21st birthday. That's 3 years. A lot of us have wasted our precious youth, don't be another victim.

>now I'm in law school destined to jew for corporations for a living

You are not "destined" to do anything. In fact, with this mentality you'll dig yourself deeper into a hole. As for engineering or being a doctor, just by saying either or I know you have no idea what they mean or what it takes to get there. Look up some numbers on them, you'll probably be shocked

>engineers

If the program is not ABET certified it's probably worthless, plus you need at least 5 years in order to be a legit professional engineer. even wages, IMO, are not impressive for engineers(most max out at 100k by mid career) and niche areas like petroleum engineering, which is now comatose, skew the numbers. You could do worse but it's not the golden goose everyone thinks.

Read http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth. Make up your own mind however.

>doctor

you'll literally be in your late 20's early 30's before you start making money and that's if you're good and did everything right

4 years mandatory undergrad(that medical school doesn't give a shit what it is should tell you something) + 4 years medical + 3 years residence + 2 years for specialization

Are you willing to go that route?

Think long and hard and research the hell out of all of this because any one of these professions will take years to achieve and you don't want to back out halfway. A great resource on employement if you're in the US

http://www.bls.gov/ooh

If you look around US websites you should find a lot of things in there too.