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School and college cause a lot of stress and anxiety. It’s time you remember that many things are more important than your grades.
1. What you’ve learned
Your grades don’t necessarily represent how much you’ve learned about the subject. Sometimes you didn’t express yourself in a way the corrector wanted, or you were quizzed about the one topic you were struggling with.
Either way, what matters far more than your actual grade is the knowledge you accumulated.
2. How much you read
Leaders are readers. How much your read is an indicator of how much you learn outside of the educational system.
Reading can boost your knowledge (especially if you read non-fiction), increase your vocabulary, make you more eloquent, train your brain, and increase your focus.
Many successful people swear by reading. It’s time you give it a shot yourself if you want to step into their footsteps.
Read also: Reading List For Personal Growth
3. Your connections
Having the right connections can make your life infinitely easier. Who do you think is more likely to get the job: The applicant with the best grades or the applicant with good grades whose friend recommends him to the boss?
Connections can also help you to be the first to know about a company that’s hiring.
4. Your creativity
The ability to create new things and ideas from scratch is one of humanity’s biggest assets.
Robots and AI will increasingly take over the monotonous and repetitive tasks of our work lives. In turn, employers will care much more about things like creativity.
Luckily for you, people are not born creative. Instead, they form that skill through practice and use. Stop saying, ‘I am not a creative person‘ and instead say, ‘I am not creating much, yet.‘
5. Your experience
Practical experience is not only the best teacher; it will also get you further in life than just grades.
After all, who would you rather hire: The A-student fresh out of college or the former B-student who’s already worked successfully for two years and got a stellar recommendation?
Big employers like Apple and Facebook don’t even demand a college degree anymore. Perhaps that’s not surprising, considering they were founded by dropouts who accomplished more with practical experience than with college degrees.
6. How you make others feel
People may forget what you said, but they rarely forget how you made them feel.
If you master the art of making others feel good, you will stand out among less charismatic A-graders.
7. The fact you are writing exams at all
Education has become such a given for big parts of the world that we all seem to forget how privileged we are. Instead we complain about our annoying school work.
Most teenagers didn’t pursue higher education many generations ago because there was no time or no money.
Not all too long ago, women weren’t even allowed to pursue higher education.
In some countries, children don’t even have the opportunity to go to elementary school.
The sole fact that you are writing tests and exams is so much more important than the grade you get.
8. Your unique combination of skills and knowledge
There are hundreds of thousands of people who’ve had your education. You will most likely never stand out as the best (or the worst) among these people.
However, you are far more likely to stand out with the unique combination of skills and knowledge you accumulate.
For example, there are a ton of law graduates. There are far fewer law graduates who also have a politics degree. And among those even less, who did an internship in an embassy and perhaps already belong to a political party.
These things are more important than your grades.
9. Your physical health
Our body is next to our mind, the second most important factor to living a fulfilled and long life.
Some students medicate themself or pull all-nighters to achieve better grades which in turn takes a toll on their physical health.
Don’t become one of them! Don’t neglect what’s so much more important than your grades: your health!
10. Where you live/search for a job
Depending on where you live and search for a job, you will have better opportunities for someone with your grades than elsewhere.
If there is a lack of teachers in your area, you are going to be able to get a great position with decent grades that would only have been open for the best graduates under normal circumstances.
11. Your work ethic
In a world where only a minuscule 15% of employees are engaged in their work, it is no wonder work ethic is immensely low.
People pretend to be sick, pretend to have a mental breakdown (some of course actually do, but too many pretend), steal from work, do online shopping at work, push their workload onto colleagues, etc.
Suppose you are one of the few with a great work ethic, who is willing to get the job done, even if it means staying at work longer once in a while, gladly taking on the difficult work everyone avoids, and who actually answers the phone. In that case, you will stand out like a bright shining beacon of excellence.
The best students are often enough not the best employees, and the latter is far more important than your grades in the long run.
12. Your social Intelligence
You need to get along with people and know how to make connections and status work for you.
Knowing how to make connections, earn favors, and have a good reputation is much more important than your grades in the long run.
13. Your emotional Intelligence
The same goes for emotional intelligence. You need to be able to handle envy, frustration, and ego in constructive ways.
14. How you study
Cramming the night before the exam and acing it only to forget everything the minute you handed in the test will get you through in the short-term but won’t help you out in the long-term. School/College is meant to teach you things that’ll help you later on in life. And although their curriculum is debatable, you need to remember the information you’ve studied in the long term, or else it has been a waste.
15. How fast you can read
Most people’s reading speed is embarrassingly slow. Our brain can read incredibly fast, yet few of us take the time to practice how to do so. In our informational age, there rarely is a career or even a day in your life in which you won’t have to read anything. Imagine how much more effective you could be if you could double or even triple your reading speed without suffering a loss of comprehension. Would you suddenly feel motivated to read news articles? How much less would you need to study if you could speed through your textbooks? How much more work could you get done if you didn’t waste so much time in your inbox? Speed reading is truly a superpower we desperately need to develop!
Read also: How I Read One Book A Week – 11 Tips To Read More
16. Your happiness
You shouldn’t be miserable achieving good grades. As morbid as it sounds, you will never know how long your life will be, so don’t waste a decade on achieving stellar grades if it makes you miserable and robs you of a life outside of college. Often enough, good grades are perfectly fine.
17. What you study
Bad grades can be an important guiding sign that you chose the wrong college degree or desperately need to change your study strategy. Most likely, there have been plenty of warnings already, but you ignored them. So now the Universe had to take out the big and painful guns, a.k.a bad grades. Analyze the reasons behind the disappointing grade and do something about it!
18. The habits you build
The life you live is shaped by the habits you practice on a daily or weekly basis.
If you let your life be ruled by toxic habits, your good grades will hardly matter for the kind of life you are living.
Good habits will go a long way, and you should cultivate them early on.
19. The habits you break
We often focus too much on starting good habits, when in fact, we should first get rid of bad ones.
In fact, you don’t even need to get rid of them but simply replace them with better habits.
20. How you feel your emotions
Suppressing bad emotions is not healthy. In the long term, it can lead to anxiety, depression, mood swings, and more.
It takes an emotionally mature person to feel every good or bad emotion without resisting it.
21. How you express your emotions
Nobody likes people who lash out at others just because they are in a bad mood.
You not only should feel your emotions but also express them in a socially acceptable way.
22. The pet that’s lighting up your heart every time you see it being all adorable
In life, the importance of grades really can’t be compared to the importance of living beings and the happiness they provide you with.
23. How much time do you spend doing what lights up your soul
You can’t postpone happiness. You can feel it now, or you’ll miss it.
You will be going to school for one, perhaps even two decades. That’s far too long to postpone your happiness for.
Looking back on your life, you will see the time you spend doing what lights up your soul as more important than your grades.
24. The mentors in your life
A good mentor can be an invaluable asset. They can put you years ahead in your growth and sometimes even provide valuable connections for you.
25. Your financial intelligence
Getting good grades to get a well-paying job is useless if you don’t know how to intelligently handle that money.
There are tons of people with a decent income that still have financial struggles. On the flip side, there have been people with a very small income who managed to grow it to an astounding amount of wealth over the decades.
26. Your mental health
Many students sacrifice their mental health in pursuit of good grades. It is not worth it!
After all, you want those good grades so you can get a good job and lead a happy life.
But with your mental health out of wack, you won’t be able to perform to your full capabilities at your job, and you most certainly won’t live the happy life you’ve hoped for.
Your mental health is more important than your grades!
27. Responsibility
I’m assuming you care about your grades so much because you want to get a high-level job. Well, those jobs always come with a ton of responsibility.
You won’t do well in your job or life if you keep blaming others for your mistakes and misfortunes.
Own up to them, or your good grades will hardly matter!
28. How you carry yourself
Nobody likes it, but first impressions do matter. A big part of the first impression you give others is the way you carry yourself.
Do you seem at ease and command the attention of the room or do you seemingly shrink into yourself and nervously fidget?
29. Persistence
Life’s path is rarely straightforward. Not everything will work out the way you had planned, and you will encounter much resistance.
Persistence is a trait that is more important than outstanding grades if you want to make it big in life.
30. Self-Awareness & Self-Reflection
Just because you’ve gotten decent grades doesn’t mean you won’t have to learn and improve your skills anymore. You’ll constantly have to learn and adapt if you want your career to go places.
And unless you get yourself a mentor or coach, you will only be able to improve if you are self-aware enough to recognize your own flaws and shortcomings.
Self-reflection is a tool to increase your self-awareness. You can do it through journaling, meditating, talking to yourself, or other methods.
31. Collaboration Skills
There are few jobs nowadays in which you won’t have to work together with people in one way or another.
Good grades matter very little if you are a nightmare to work with. You can never be the expert on every topic necessary for the job, so you’ll have to collaborate.
Do you have any other suggestions for things that are more important than your grades?
What’s your experience been like with grades? Are you content with your results, or do you feel your work isn’t reflected in your grades?
Until next time, Felicity Seekers!
