Some things are true for anything you want to excel at. Whether it is an art form or a sport, or for that matter, even your CAT preparation. These are essentially tenets of investment and behave in a very similar way, regardless of the resource that is being invested. Understanding these will help you retain perspective during your CAT preparation journey.
Rule 1:
Efforts have to precede results. You have to sow before you reap. You have to invest before you get returns. You have to start and stay in the game before you can win.
Rule 2:
Progress is slow and painstaking in most cases. Especially at the beginning of a new venture. Despair, dejection, desperation – all these are a part of the journey. Your patience and belief are tested as much as your effort and ability.
Rule 3:
While efforts generally need to be linear, results almost never are. For the first 30% of your efforts, you may hardly see any results. For the first few hundred hours of your online CAT Coaching or offline CAT preparation, you may not even see a blip on the radar of progress. That is when you will feel all your effort has yielded nothing. And that is when your patience and belief will be tested.
Summary:
But while the graph of efforts needs to remain broadly linear and consistent, the results will follow a different curve, that stays low for a long time, before unfolding a stellar exponential move upwards – which would form one cycle of rewards. And these cycles are likely to repeat as you hit another plateau.
Efforts are linear; results are late but usually exponential. This is how investment works – of time, money, skill and any other resource.
Knowing that efforts and results behave differently is crucial to staying cool, and believing in yourself through the journey of success at CAT!
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 