JEE Motivation

02 Mar 2020

Originally answered on Quora to “ow can I stay motivated during JEE preparation?”

Sucking at anything is a depressingly easy thing to do. If you don’t like pulling things apart until you can see their fundamental structures, you’re in trouble.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with losing motivation and going into a downward spiral during JEE preparation. Many other things are at least as hard, and easy to give up on. The world is full of terribly difficult pursuits. Most of the people who excel at these pursuits are deeply and intrinsically motivated to them.

A JEE aspirant hears on a daily basis that the skills required to excel in JEE, one of the most difficult exams out there, are acquired. Innate talents do play a major role but not more than the former do. One can surely be born with a mind that works well, just as one can surely develop such a mind through diligent effort.

The problem is that, thanks to the media and more uprising to coaching classes, a thundering herd of otherwise perfectly talented people have decided that qualifying JEE and getting into IIT would get them a great (or at least stable) job and oodles of money. These people are extrinsically motivated, and while there’s nothing wrong with wanting a decent job that might make you an unlikely bazillionaire that wanting isn’t going to make you a competent aspirant or even a great engineer if you get in. The situation every year is like Christmas in September for coaching classes with dramatically raising enrollment figures and lakhs of students giving up at one point after they get in.

Of course, there’s this problem: most of these students can’t handle the tough and often stressing environments that are central to success in JEE. The students themselves are rarely motivated to throw themselves into these problems: they just want to clear an exam any way, not see it as an intellectual challenge, and while that works for a small percentage of students, most fail.

You are reading this because you got yourself in to do this, right?

The irony of all this is that it’s at best a sideshow to the people who’re inexorably drawn to really work hard and get in. Those are the people who drive progress even in future and have successful careers; they are the people whom the thundering herd seeks to imitate. They’re still signing up for this, they’re still relentlessly improving themselves, and they’re still doing the vast majority of important work.

Convince yourself to do it first. The devil is of course in the details.