Self Help Application Challenge

Hey guys,

Time for a little personal shit. I'm doing pretty awful in school right now. I'm completely failing one class (to a horrible extent) and hopefully getting C's in all the other classes if I manage to do extremely well as the semester winds down. The thing that bugs me most about this is that this is not a problem of me understanding the material, nor is it a problem of me having the desire... I actually enjoy most of my classes, so homework isn't that big a deal. The problem lies entirely in execution.

If I had to break it down, I'd say there's three aspects of execution that I had trouble with:

1. Organization
This was a huge one. The class I'm failing was due to a bunch of stupid mistakes, like reading a chapter but not writing out the two required questions for the homework. Probably the biggest issue.

2. Clarifying and Remembering priorities.
This began to be an issue about half way through the semester. I forgot about my initial goals of doing exceptionally well at school, and began to make decisions based on other things. This led to a loss of momentum for me, which created problems with my...

3.Self Discipline
Once I lost that momentum, the next step would have been to use self-discipline to pull myself out of the hole and get back on track. I found myself thinking about priorities and making efforts to reorganize myself, but not following through because "I don't feel like it" or "I'll do it later" or "there's plenty of time".

Without that momentum backing me, I lacked the self discipline to say "fuck it, ACT NOW."

A lot of this stuff ties directly into empowering your inner-man, but that's for different articles.

Anyways, the second thing that really bugs me about this stuff is that I don't have any excuse for being bad at ANY of these things. Not ONLY do I read about them for fun, but the classes I'm taking (Art and Science of Management, The Art of the New, Psychology of Learning, and Entrepreneurial Communication and Influence)all relate DIRECTLY to these three issues. I probably have more information on how to deal with these three issues in my own room than many of my peers have seen in their entire lives.

The problem, again, lies in Execution and Application. I have the information, now I need to start USING it. Yes, I'm busy, but I can take one to two hours or so every day in the morning to read one chapter from a self help book, answer the questions it asks, and apply the material.  I'll write about my experiences here.

The book I'm starting with is 4 hour work week by Tim Ferris. I'm using this book because I think it addresses all the issues I've mentioned above from a short term perspective.  This is important because I only have about two weeks left of the semester.

The book is specified towards business, but I'm going to apply it in the context school.

I began this earlier today, then realized it was rather silly to be doingsomething so applicable to my blog and NOT be writing about it.

I started with Chapter Three, again, I'm applying these principles to school... and I think I even misinterpeted some of the questions to make them relevant.  But that's not the point, it's about taking action and applying his principles so that I don't fuck up again.  I'll post up the questions and answers from that chapter in a seperate post.