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I am looking for my drive, the motivation that pushes me to excel. You see I seem to have dropped it, somewhere along my way to college. Have you seen it? It looks very much like a kid in the middle of the night with a book to glued to his nose studying it. Hmmm… It also looks like that student in the library, who seems to have gone through the table of contents of every single book, in the quest for that one book that will unlock his research paper. People always tell you to go back where you last had the object you are looking for. I’ve gone back to my high school, looked in every nook and cranny, but I didn’t seem to have dropped there.

It feels like you don’t have enough energy to hammer the nail into the wood. You go through this feeling of regret every single day, every single test. When you get the results, you tell yourself, “Who took this test? It has your name written on it but surely the grade doesn’t do you justice.” Yet, on that same day, you go home and surf the net, check your email, chat with friends, read though blogs and listen to music. But you won’t pick up the book and start studying for that long test tomorrow. It seems as though every single muscle in your body and every single occurrence in the galaxy is keeping you from studying (except perhaps for that barely audible voice in your head that is being drowned out by Simple Plan on your iTunes playlist). And when tomorrow comes (it always comes), you take the test and leave the classroom hammering your head to the wall. 

I wasn’t always like this. Back in high school, I had the highest grades among my barkada. They would ask me about the vertical angle theorem or the activity series of metals and I’d have an answer. If I didn’t, I would have opened the book and looked for the answer. Sure, I wasn’t the smartest person in the class, but I was smart enough to copy the math homework from. I was smart enough to understand proving back in the third year, when my other classmates would scratch their heads and randomly write down theorems.

It felt good back in high school, when I had my drive. It felt good to have my classmates ask me about the answer number 12 after the physics long test. It felt even better when me another classmate asked me about number 20 in the same long test. It felt good to be able to answer the math homework without asking for help from another classmate. But it felt even better when my classmates asked me about the homework. Of course, even my parents were proud of me. On family gatherings, it does your ego well when you hear your parents casually mentioning your accomplishments in school. That kept me going through high school.

It’s different in college. I remember someone telling me, “There aren’t a lot of differences from Xavier and Ateneo. Heck, even the gardens and the benches are the same.” He was wrong. There are a lot of differences. (He was right about the gardens and the benches though) It’s like what my dad used to say about fishes and ponds. Being in high school was like being a big (not the biggest) fish in a small pond. The problem comes when you go to college. You become the small fish in a BIG pond. What’s true is that you didn’t shrink, but rather the pond grew exponentially. To make it even harder for you, in college, there are even bigger fish swimming around with you.

It’s harder in college. It’s like moving from the featherweight to the heavyweight class in boxing. No longer was I the smart person who people approached about the chemistry assignment. Amidst me were salutatorians and valedictorians from science high schools and private high schools around the country. I couldn’t even get a B in my first long test in college.

I think I lost my drive somewhere around that time. I was motivated because of the people around me and when these people around me changed, I no longer had the drive. My drive, which was fueled by pats on the back and words of encouragement, could not continue to be ablaze in college. My motivation didn’t come from myself and that’s I guess where I went wrong.  In college, where you only have yourself to rely on, I have to find a new motivation to excel in the things that I do. Else, I let myself be swallowed up by mediocrity and spend the rest of my life regretting everything.

But alas, here lies the Great Wall of China. If I can no longer use my old motivation to drive myself to be competent, at the very least, then how am I to find this new motivation within myself? I would not want to be stuck in first gear for the rest of my college life, looking for that spark that will help me push myself harder. How do I know that this motivation is even inside of me? Where do you start looking for something as abstract as it is unique to every person? It sucks not knowing where you are and what your supposed to do. Groping in the dark feeling my way through life isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I graduated high school. What sucks even more is seeing other people whiz by with their lives all mapped out, it makes you feel even more pathetic about yourself.

Here is an optimistic thought, “Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.” Winston Churchhill said this.

I still don’t get the joy and glory part though. Oh well.