Tag Archives: learning

Writing as Work and Hobby

Daily writing prompt
What do you enjoy most about writing?
View all responses

How did I get into writing? I’m sure that every great (and even the not so great writer) started as a complete bookworm. As did I. The first ever novel that I read was The Famous Five by Enid Blyton, of course before that I had been held captive by countless other comic books and children’s magazines. But I distinctly remember the exact day that I finished reading The Five go to Finniston Farm, I put down the book and opened up my little diary and attempted to write a story just like the one I had read. Two chapters later the diary lay in the corner and the papers were shredded to bits. I hit writers block a little too early. I cant remember the exact day I actually started writing, but I have some pretty old memories of coming up with stories of talking dogs and girls with long brown hair connecting with their roots and finding out they had superpowers!

According to my mom I used to make up all these stories even before that, when I was just a baby I used to make all kinds of stories and characters to keep myself entertained (and also anybody else who wanted to listen).

Following that came the tween phase where I attempted my hand at journaling and making diary entries (completely inspired by Anne Frank) , but since consistency wasn’t my strongest traits, they all ended up in the trash eventually. It was also during this period of my life that I discovered the word of E-books and that just led me into a whole new world.

I will admit, I found a little too much comfort in the world of fiction, and yes, it was a pretty huge distraction from my studies and my parents were not as happy as I was. Despite the fact, I went through book after book, finding new genres every week and falling in love with the styles of so many authors.

My early teens were pretty much filled with Blake Pierce and W L Knightly (still would binge read all their books). Following that came the second attempt at writing a novel. And as much as I cringe thinking of that “horror” novel, to that version of me it was a masterpiece.

That began my pursuit of creating the best works that I could. I spent as much time as I could (keep in mind that in a brown household studies take first priority) devoted to thinking and re-thinking plots and characters visualizing different narratives, subconsciously dealing with some of my own personal life problems through these characters lives.

And that phase of my life led me to start this blog and post some of my own works (PS – I also have a second blog where I post my own short stories and novels) .

After a pretty long run of consistency and regular uploads I hit dead end. I had nothing good to put out into the creative spaces of the internet and even the smallest of works ended up in a pile of trash under my desk until I gave up all hope. I’m not proud of admitting this but I almost gave up all hopes of ever becoming anything more than a regular teenager with a couple blogs on the vast internet. Obviously a part of me hated that but it was just so easy, I had school and college and a whole bunch of extracurriculars that required my attention more than some stupid hobby.

A part of me hated to believe that the one thing I enjoyed so much was just going to be left in the past. But what was I to do? Writing was too difficult, much less writing everyday and as a profession, it just wasn’t for me. I wanted myself to believe that not every hobby is meant to turn into a money making machine. And for a while I believed that, I let go of the idea that I would ever become a writer and just tried to move on with my life.

Every once in a while I did try to come up with something even moderately close to amazing, but the lack of consistency translated into the algorithm not really pushing any of my works, and that translated into me being more and more disheartened and push aside the pen.

But the past few months have been a time of new growth and new experiences for me. I recently moved to a new state and officially decided to drop a year before college. Now, although these are not too major changes for my life (I’ve spent my whole life travelling around), I realized with all these new changes in life there is one more thing that I need to change- my mindset. I’ve spent the last few weeks thinking and re-thinking my life and career, and my choices right now.

I realised that I’m very young, (no seriously, I’m just 18) I’m still living with my parents and I’m not even in college. I have practically my whole life infront of me and its way too early to make a solid decision like pursuing writing as a complete career, let alone making this blog into a full time thing.

While there is nothing wrong with choosing a career and working towards it from an early stage, it is also wrong to lead every young adult into believing that they need to have their whole life figured out and be set into it from the time they turn into an adult.

I let myself believe that my worth was set on how well I could work rather than the worth of my work. I’ve been trying to grow and in that process also realise that growth takes a lot of time and trial and error. There is nothing wrong with me trying to take my time and give myself room to learn and breath and take everything in, and most of all enjoy the process. I forgot that writing started out as a hobby, something that I was supposed to enjoy, that brought me peace, instead it had turned into another task throughout the day that I had started to despise and roll my eyes at.

But that changes now. I’m reaching a new phase of my life, where I learn and grow as a person, and that will reflect in what I write, it might not be consistent and it might not please the algorithm gods, but that is what true growth is. Its not to appease the masses, but to please oneself. And that begins now.

Love, Anu.

About Learning

As I enter my last year of highschool, the idea of “learning” holds a very important part in my life. This year is going to decide the rest of my life (according to peers and seniors) and so the idea of learning or being good at something by learning it had become more or less the focal point of my life now.
So I decided to read up a little of this subject, something which we’ve all done and we all continue doing, in different ways.

So here’s what I found from learning about learning –

Learning new things has become a skill everyone has to develop in order to thrive in the mordern world where change is an everyday occurance. In order to handle this everyday change, we need to be able to learn and unlearn just as rapidly.
With the mordern world, if you want to reach any level of success, you have to aim for being the best (it’s hard to accept it, but being average just won’t work anymore).

Every field out there is constantly changing, everything is becoming bigger and better and to keep up with the changes we have to be able to develop ourselves in such a way that we thrive, and that can only be by having the habit of learning (all the time!)

When we think of learning schools and colleges is mostly the first thing that comes to mind. For the average person going back to school/college or being in institutions isn’t always an option, that’s when ultralearning comes in.

What is ultralearning?

( Source – Ultralearning by Scott H Young )

According to the book by Scott H Young, “Ultralearning is a strategy for aggressive, self-directed learning.” Simply speaking, it is a way of dealing with the ever changing world by taking the power of effective learning into your own hands.

It’s about taking decisions concerning the idea of learning, more so, the ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ of learning. Ultralearning tends to have unusual steps/methods for the most effective learning, and these “ultralearners” are those who make/search for some of these bizarre steps for maximum learning efficiency.

Ultralearning aims to highlight some of these core points

  • Start by learning the ‘how’ of learning. To put it simply, understand how you want to learn the new skill.
  • Practice makes perfect, so try to implement what you’re learning in everyday life.
  • Your comfort zone is your biggest enemy. Step out of it when it comes to learning new things.
  • Feedback from outside can be your biggest help. Learn to take criticism and suggestions.
  • Dissolve difficult and complex tasks into smaller simpler tasks.
  • Constantly testing your knowledge helps in making an assessment of your own skills and changes you need to make.
  • Explore different concepts and ideas to widen your horizon.
  • Focus is an essential part of learning. So cut off distractions.

Speaking of distractions, which are the most common when it comes to learning?

Your Work

Some of the work that we wish to pursue can be a little too difficult, making it easier for other things to distract us, or simply seem like a “better” use of our time. That’s when the idea of breaking complex tasks into simpler task comes into play. When you try to do something complex it’s difficult for your brain to take in all the new and complex information. Breaking a difficult task/skill into smaller, more manageable chunks allows our mind to accept and process information much more easily and effectively.

Your Environment

It’s obvious enough, the things in and around your surroundings hold the power to grab your attention and distract you from the work right infront of you. Surrounding yourself with a “learner friendly” environment is essential to make the most out of your learning time.
To test out how well a work area is for you, try learning something for a set amount of time, during that timespan keep track of how many times you get distracted by something and at the end of the timespan test yourself to see how much of the information you were able to retain. Try it with a few possible options and go for what suit you best.

Your mind

The biggest distractor! If you feel constantly distracted, without it being your environment or any other external medium, it might be that it’s all internal!
The negative emotions – depressive, angry thoughts, the whirlwind of thoughts travelling in your head, the daydreamings, the million notes going through your mind – it all plays a big role in messing up with your ability to learn and have a clear head for recalling information you’ve already learnt.

With all these distractions known, it’s important to note that you can overcome these distractions with a little hard work and effort.

What is Interleaving?

Interleaving is another skill that people who are forever learning swear by, especially while learning something new.
It is all about spacing out the learning process over a long period of time, randomising the information and frequent active recalling of past information that has been already learnt.

It allows the brain to hold focus for longer periods of time and forces you to adjust yourself to probelm solving in every step, allowing the information to be stored as a long term memory rather than passively learning and re-learning the same thing with no positive result.

A few final tips for all the hungry learners

  1. To learn a concept completely, it’s important to understand it fully. And to understand something thoroughly visualising it plays a very big role.
  2. Practicing everything you learn – be it in the form of tests or quizzes or even using it in real life situations helps fixing something to your mind.
  3. Whenever you face roadblocks, take a break. Overly obsessing over a particular topic might not always help solve it, instead, taking a break and looking at the problem from a different angle can help get a better perspective.
  4. Plenty of sleep is always a key aspect of learning. Sleep not only affects your recall and memory, it also helps your mind calm down and helps functioning of your creative side.
  5. Self motivation is the most important aspect of learning something while being happy. When you learn something that you actually love and have full interest in, you feel motivated to be the best at it.

A Little More On Procrastination

I’ve spoken about being a major procrastinator many times, but it’s time to go a little deeper into it and learn more. (If you’re a procrastinator like me and you’re reading this, chances are you’re procrastinating something right now, think about what it is.)

What does it mean to be a procrastinator?

To procrastinate means to delay something that needs to be done as soon as possible and actively finding ‘better’ things to do rather than doing the things that need to be done.
It’s knowing fully well, the consequences of delaying something yet doing it only to face trouble at the end – be it by rushing through work or a project or having to listen to long lectures from seniors.

Procrastinators are these exact people!
We tend to put everything till the very last moment knowing fully well the negative outcomes of it yet focusing our attention towards things that are less attention demanding and something that can distance us from the work that needs to be done in the present.
Procrastinators tend to have a much more optimistic idea of time and tend to push everything for later thinking they’ll ‘manage’ everything just fine. (Which is mostly just putting their luck to the test)

But then why is it that people tend to procrastinate?

(According to so many different sources)

It is commonly said that procrastinators only procrastinate to distract themselves from their fears of failure or inability to commit themselves to a particular work or continuously do it for a long span of time.
They tend to procrastinate only to have more control over their emotions.

According to some studies, procrastinators don’t really have control over their habit of procrastination, for them it is a response behaviour towards extreme authoritarian lifestyle one has had in the past or even in the present.

According to some other studies, procrastinators procrastinate because they tend to prefer the “now” and value how they spend it instead of planning or worrying about the future.
They prefer having fun and enjoying the present rather than waiting for it in the future.

Some studies also claim that most of the procrastination done by the average person is unconscious and can probably be avoided if people simply focus more on their everyday life and be more organized.

There is also the final group of people that think the people who procrastinate do so because they lack the motivation to actually work and are unaware of the powers of their own emotions – of the present and the future and the role these emotions can play in getting the motivation they need for getting things done.

But what is the actual reason for procrastination? Why is it that we feel so much better just pushing things to the side and instead focusing our attention to less important, more fun tasks?
The answer to this could be absolutely anything – it would differ from individual to individual, you will just have to look within yourself for this one.

Now if you do actually realise how or more importantly why you procrastinate – is there any way to stop procrastinating?
In the most honest way – no, there isn’t something you can do that will magically change you from master level procrastinator to the diligent, hardworking, good child.

You can’t change yourself just magically, but there are some things you could do to make procrastination better for yourself.

How to use procrastination better?

-> The first and maybe most important thing is to embrace procrastination as a part of yourself. Know that you can’t change everything about yourself, so instead of finding ways to change it and look for ways that you can be yourself and still get work done while being happy.

-> The most difficult step is putting aside distractions and getting to work. It’s really easy to say “Just do it” but real life application of that is a lot more difficult.
A few steps to consider before saying “Just do it” are
1) make a to do list – preferably with more easier tasks at first and the tasks getting progressively difficult.
2) making a mental (or physical) note of each thing you have to do and alloting time to it based on how long it will take you to do that specific task, and if you can, allot yourself some extra time just incase.
3) use deadlines to your advantage – while alloting yourself time to work on something keep the deadline in mind and allot yourself a timeline which ends earlier.
4) create “punishments” for yourself for work not done (no, don’t go beating yourself with a lamp like Dobby), make the punishments something that will test your self control, for example, something like no sugar for a whole week or not going on social media for a week.
5) control the distractions around you – as much as possible. It isn’t easy to turn everything off and live like a monk, and it probably isn’t the most wise thing for many people, but try to limit the distractions around you and try to hold yourself accountable for the things around you.

-> When setting up to get into the work zone know that it takes time to get into the rhythm of work and different types of tasks tend to have a different rhythm to it. So when you place work for yourself, try to group out similar tasks together to stay within the similar rhythm and not having to switch your mind from one type to another type of task.

-> When you get into the “Just do it” mindset, remember that it won’t necessarily last for hours. So whenever possible try to write down all the things you need to get done and the possibile steps to do it and the things to keep in mind – this will be your blueprint.
So the next time you feel even the smallest bit of energy, pass a glance at this blueprint and that will give you the idea and motivation to finish the task at hand.

-> Speaking of motivation – know that simply having an idea in your mind or a goal ahead of you won’t always motivate you to stop slacking and start working. Sure, it does help to have a visual idea of what you’re working towards, but sometimes feeling instead of simply seeing can be more help.

-> Lastly, learn that overcoming procrastination and using your bad habits for your own advantage will take some time and a lot of effort and relapsing back can be completely normal but you need to be able to overcome those hurdles and not fall back.

Learning From The Past

Some people look back at thier past, to find happy memories, some find sad, hurtful memories, but the thing that will be common for everyone looking back at their past is that you can (and should) learn from the past.

The experiences, the people and the situations you were in – they all have a much bigger purpose in your life. They are there to help you learn and help you grow, for you to grow into the best version of yourself.

The past holds high notes of wisdom, notes that can change your present if you gain inspiration from it.

It’s fair to say that we’ve all had good and bad times in our past, times when we were happy, and times when we weren’t.

Always remember that life is like an everflowing river, constantly swirling and making new paths, sometimes carrying on with the old paths and sometimes making new ones.
No matter good or bad, your past can only control your present and future to an extent.

There is a fine balance between honouring the past and losing yourself in it.

Eckhart Tolle



We all have, at some point, made mistakes in our past, but replaying all the regrets from the past is not going to make any difference to the present.

The way to get over the regrets from these mistakes is to actually learn the proper lesson from it. When we learn from it, it is no longer a negative element in your life, rather, it becomes the positive aspect of our past.

Remember the lessons the past has taught you, but don’t let the fear from the past experiences affect the choices you make in the present.

We need to be able to learn from the past, but at the same time, it’s important to update those lessons based on the current situation and the person that you’ve changed into.

It's good to learn about the mistakes from the past and use them to make better decisions for the future but it's important to know that at the end, your mistakes only guide you, they do not reflect who you are.


We can’t change what’s already happened, so instead of thinking of those times, it’s important to grow into a better version for the present and the future.
Try to see the past as training for a better future and use the lessons to grow.

The way to actually grow from the past is to firstly have the self-realization and courage to accept the mistakes you made and acknowledge it’s consequences.
It’s important to have the courage to make changes to your actions to make changes for the future results.

Have the courage to recognise the behaviours from the past that are negatively affecting your present. Analyse those behavioural patterns and their affect on you.

Then, take responsibility for your actions and the mistakes. When you take the responsibility,it becomes easier to actually accept it and move on and also stops you from always bringing up the past and blaming others for the mistakes and problems you faced in the past.

Bringing up the past and blaming others for the bad in it is never going to lead to anything positive and will hinder your relationship.
We bring up the past and try to connect it with the present when we feel like we’re not in control of the situation, what we need to understand is that it does not help the situation at hand and instead pulls the focus away from the main issue.

Instead of holding grudges with people connected to a sad past, try reasoning with them and having conversations. Resentment only takes away power and energy from you, forgiveness sets you free.

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

Percy Bysshe Shelley



Once you understand and accept the past and every thing in it – good and bad, it becomes easy to learn from it and steer into a better future.

Teach yourself better ways to deal with situations and people. Teach yourself to actually be present at the moment and most importantly, teach yourself to be responsible for your actions and think about the consequences it can have in your future.

The best thing about looking at the past is all the good memories. Whenever you feel low or unmotivated and need something to cheer you up its a good exercise to look back at the times when you were in a better state of mind and felt powerful.
Think of the times when things went your way and you were productive and made positive changes to your life.

Try to remember things to the last detail and then use the same energy that you felt then. Manifest that power back into your life and harness that energy to drive away the negative energy surrounding you (sort of like the Patronus charm – Expecto Patronum ! )