Many of you have written to me expressing your worries about poor scores in some AIRCATs/mock CATs and how it is affecting your CAT preparation.
Many others among you would have faced a similar challenge in any new field you adopted anytime in your life – for example, you just started learning how to play TT and a friend who was better than you kept thrashing you day in and day out. Till one day, when he didn’t/couldn’t.
A few questions to answer first:
Did you learn to walk in your first attempt? Or would it have taken 100s of falls and even injuries?
Did you give up when you failed to walk for the first few times?
Did you worry and compare your progress with that of other toddlers?
More recently, did you become a master of all those tough, leveled games (that you could play alone) say on the PS5, or on your phone, in the first attempt?
Did you just stop playing or did you enjoy improving and got better with time?
Were you tougher mentally as a child than you are (pretending to be) now?
The key difference is when you compare only with yourself, you focus on improvement.
But when you compare with others, it shifts the focus to winning/losing, doing better/worse and so on.
Stop comparing and stop being a quitter. All you need to do is relax and try your best.
When you get data (scores), you should analyze it with your mind (to improve) and not take it to heart.
Once you know what is to be done to improve is when you bring your heart in and try passionately.
Worrying won’t help; it never does.
Doing will help; it always does.
You have the choice to react or act!
Bad scores are not a problem – in fact they are an important part of your CAT preparation. They just show how much you can improve and that can enable you to create the best CAT coaching experience for yourself.
How you react to bad scores (and not the score by itself) is what will decide your progress curve!
About the author: Deekshant has sleep-walked through several 100 and 99.9 %iles in practically every section of the CAT. That he is a cricket fan and he writes okay is evident from most of his posts. 1000s of our students swear that he can motivate almost anyone to double his/her percentile through very simple yet powerful inputs. And that’s why every MBAGuru student has direct access to him via mail and Telegram. Oddly, he somehow also finds the time to write songs professionally. And yes … almost missed this … he is an alumnus of IIT Delhi & IIM Cal 
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