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[kerlc]

  What worked for me was starting out by repeating to myself "I'll work on it solidly for 10 minutes, then I'll take a break if I can't stand it, but come on 10 minutes - I can surely grit my teeth for ANYTHING for 10 minutes", and doing 10 minutes of work, reward with 20 minutes of f-off, 10 minutes of work, etc.

Your method reminds me of this. 

But I concur.

Also, keep your first goals, keep them small and straightforward. Biting off what you can't handle will only bring more procrastination.

[Muz]

does anyone have any advise for me?

Find a niche in life you'll be happy with. Don't worry too much about what other people expect from you. Intelligence, education and hard work are not prerequisites for success. They are merely tools that can sometimes be useful.

Decide what you want and focus on that. Don't worry about the tools you use to get it.

Agree with this. Would toss money onto that list of tools too. I'm surprised how many people are willing to chase a $500 increase in monthly salary over doing something that would net them millions within 4 years.

Hard part is finding that niche. What are you spending most of your time on? What kinds of things would you do a job you hate to do in order to afford that thing you love? Everyone has their own calling.

I'd recommend trying everything, until you find something that clicks and that you're willing to do for free, which others would pay to do. You're still young, you can swap between different subjects and find something you like. Note that in many schools teachers aren't very good at teaching subjects - I learned way more from Europa Universalis than I did from school.

Personally, I enjoy cognitive science and applications of it (management, routines, motivation). Maybe you might enjoy optimization. Maybe you like stories (history/scriptwriting is a good niche for that). Maybe you like talking to people (marketing, sales, business development). Maybe you like planning things (project management, city design, systems analysis, etc). Someone out there is willing to pay you to do what you love doing.


Oh, and use the Pomodoro Technique:
http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/download/pdf/Pomodoro-Cheat-Sheet.pdf

1. Do something for 25 minutes. Don't do anything else.
2. Take a 5 minute break afterwards.
3. Repeat.
4. Every 4 breaks, take a 15 min break.

Or if that's too tiring, do 30 minute breaks. 30 minute breaks after 30 minutes of work can be more powerful when doing difficult work.

[Leatra]

Kinda weird how he never logged in after starting this thread.

You didn't commit suicide, I hope.

[professorlamp]

Hey Sprin

Let me give you a possible future example of yourself.

You sound a lot like my past self so I'll just tell you my story.
When I grew up I didn't have any passions, I COULD apply myself but never did, I had smart friends and to this day still do. We occasionally got into trouble given the fact that we lived in a remote area with nothing fun to do, all we could do was burn things, climb trees and play a shit ton of final fantasy and worms armageddon.

My life stayed pretty stagnant until I hate about 16 and finished my GCSE's. I pretty much failed them getting a D in almost every subject apart from Welsh which I got an A in and Maths which I got a C in. It was when I was 16 that one of my friends bought a guitar round to my friends house where we were sleeping over. I played it with my thumb for 12 hours straight because I didn't know the proper way, every since that day I've been driven to wanting to know more and more about music. When I largely exhausted music, I had developed a good habit of studying which has pretty much saved me. When I went to college about a year after 16 I studied a crappy performing arts course for a year because I didn't have the grades to do actual music courses. After I finished the performing arts course, I then went on and studied music. I finished my music course and found a love for recording music aswell, I got okay grades from college and ended up going to not the best university to do audio engineering. I worked my arse off the whole time I was there, locking myself away in the production suites so I could programme and build synthesizers from the ground up.

At the end of University I came out with a 2:1 which is a B. I was very happy with that given my educational history and that most establishments will ask for this grade. When I graduated uni I was and still am adamant about doing music for a living. I don't care about money, I care about time. I happily sacrifice days of extra work so I can get days of extra time to do things.

Where am I now?

Currently I work 2 days a week (two 15 hours shifts, its long but worth it) in a hostel as a night manager. I love the job and the amount of free time it gives me. I have 5 days off to do my own ventures, I make boardgames, I write music, I compose for peoples video games, I write reviews, I do alot these days. It all stemmed from the fact that I had something to drive me.

Although you might seem that you can't finding anything to do, or worth doing, there is something. You just haven't found it yet.

[Sprin]

Wow cool story... 
Well thanks for all your advise guys.


And no I did not comit suicide... What made you think that?

[eerr]

I have two methods of learning to be good at math:

Raw number crunching (for every little topic)
Or directly understanding how the bits of math work, more than the teacher will tell you.

[Grakelin]

Hey, um, just wanna say that it's a bad idea to take advice from a Cracked article written by a guy who thinks Alec Baldwin's character in Glengarry Glen Ross is cool. At the end of the movie, no sales have been made.

[Leatra]

Wow cool story... 
Well thanks for all your advise guys.


And no I did not comit suicide... What made you think that?

Pardon my black and humorless sarcasm. Anyway, I wish you luck. High school is tough. Having bad grades, short attention spam, procrastinating a lot and being unmotivated means only one thing: school sucks. You'll feel a lot better if you manage to get to a good university. Studying what you like is a lot better than studying what people throw at you.

Also, find a hobby. I started writing around a year ago and it turned into a really good hobby. It started out as something I did because I was feeling lazy and empty, not in an angsty way but more like feeling useless. It was impossible for me to study. While studying, I always found myself doodling on my notebooks, playing with pencils, "just checking e-mails", picking my lips off, etc after 15 minutes of studying. Oh, and that picking the skin off lips thing started to become a thing around the times when I hit bottom. I was struggling to not end up as a high school dropout at one point and the pressure of having no siblings, combined with the expectations of my family, was making it worse. The fact that I had to give up my lifelong dream didn't help.

I sucked at everything in high school. I was only good at writing but it's not like I could study becoming a writer in college. I gave up on my dreams about becoming a programmer because I sucked at maths. I started having a new lifelong dream about becoming a psychologist. That didn't turn out well too. Because of the shitty education system in my country, I had to learn maths to become a psychologist. I decided to give it all I got but around the times I started to study integral, I realized how much I sucked at maths. No matter how much I studied, I fucked up some trigonometry formulas which I spent hours memorizing and got really bad grades. After getting 5/100 in one exam, I gave up completely.

Around the end of high school, I knew I had to crush my own dreams before it got crushed. I decided to do one thing I knew I could do: translating. I'm currently studying translation and interpretation and I don't have a lifelong dream about "becoming" something this time. I'm not really interested in college. So, I needed a goal, which reminded me of the times when my teachers and classmates were always praising my creative writing skills.

I'm currently working on a novel and my aim is to get it published after I graduate. It's good to have goals which are not about school. Most people just have goals like graduating from college, getting a bachelor's degree or totally nailing the next maths exam. The rest have dreams about "becoming" something. I'm content with what I am. I just have aims about "doing" for now. We'll see how life flows.

I suggest you to have a long-term hobby. It feels good to be motivated towards doing something when everything seems dull and uninteresting.

[ChairmanPoo]

Hey, um, just wanna say that it's a bad idea to take advice from a Cracked article written by a guy who thinks Alec Baldwin's character in Glengarry Glen Ross is cool. At the end of the movie, no sales have been made.

I'm very skeptical about Cracked's "advice" in general. And their latest trend of publishing a series of preachy or "self-helpy" articles has alienated me quite a bit.

[Leatra]

Hey, um, just wanna say that it's a bad idea to take advice from a Cracked article written by a guy who thinks Alec Baldwin's character in Glengarry Glen Ross is cool. At the end of the movie, no sales have been made.

I'm very skeptical about Cracked's "advice" in general. And their latest trend of publishing a series of preachy or "self-helpy" articles has alienated me quite a bit.

Their articles tend to be usually exaggerated for laughs. Anybody can preach about a "correct" way to live and assume it's going to work for everybody. I don't see much alienating stuff (I didn't read every article) and I don't take that kind of articles seriously but still, they are interesting to read since all other self-improvement stuff points out the obvious (make friends, have a hobby, think positive, etc), just like I did with my last post. Seriously though, having a hobby helps.

[kerlc]

I found that having a hobby (amateur writing in my case) postpones suicide just long enough for it to stop being a viable escape route.