I’ve been going through a rough patch and that often lends itself to introspection where you look inward to try and determine how you got here. At least that’s what introverts like me tend to do.
And that can sometimes lead to very harsh criticism of oneself, sometimes undeservedly so. I found myself going down that rabbit hole and then remembered an occurrence when I was in college doing B.Com at the University of Nairobi’s Faculty of Commerce.
I had this classmate – let’s call him Jake – who loved to party. Jake’s family was wealthy and he had a car, something very rare during our days in college. He was outgoing and down to earth so naturally, people gravitated to him and he was very popular.
He threw parties in his dorm room practically every weekend and they were always packed with students. It helped that he never seemed to run out of pocket money so booze flowed like water during these events.
Jake basically treated the four years we spent at Lower Kabete Campus as one long party. He never attended classes and as far as I know, never set foot in the library. I’m not sure he even knew where it was located.
I wasn’t a bookworm like my roommate who spent every available minute in the library from the first day of the semester till the end. I attended classes but the library saw me only a few times during my stay at the institution as I preferred to study in my room usually around exam time. I was that student that took things easy and then when exams approached, tried to cram everything in a short period.
One day, as the end of semester exams approached, Jake asked to borrow my notes. “I’ll be studying late,” I replied.
“No problem. Just let me know what time to come for them once you’re ready to sleep.”
“Is 11 p.m. too late?”
“That’s fine.”
“I will be waking up early to study. Can I get the notebook back at 6 a.m.?”
“I’ll slip it under your door before you wake up,” he assured me.
He took the notebook and sure enough, when I woke up the next morning, it was on the floor as promised.
This went on for a week or so. Jake would borrow my notes on different units and use them to study at night while I slept.
When the results of the exams came out, he had scored As in most of the subjects while I scored B+ or Bs.
I was mystified. Here was a dude who never attended class, hence the reason for borrowing my notes. I had sat and listened to the lecturer and therefore had a first-hand understanding of the subject matter from the source. Jake was using my notes (a second-hand reference for lack of a better phrase). His study was based on my own understanding of the subject so how could he score higher than me, who wrote the notes?
I still don’t understand it today and concluded that Jake was simply brilliant. A few people I shared this story with wondered why I didn’t stop giving him my notes. Yeah, the arrangement continued the following semester.
Refusing to share didn’t make sense for two reasons. First, Jake only used my notes when I was asleep so he wasn’t inconveniencing me in any way. And he was very faithful about returning them at the agreed time. He never once failed in this. Even if I said 4 a.m., I would find the notes under my dorm room door when I woke up.
Second, if I refused to give him the notes, would that automatically guarantee me an A grade? Of course not. All I could do was sit back and marvel that someone could use my notes, having never attended the class and score higher grades.
It taught me something else too, although I didn’t realise it until years later. Given the same set of circumstances, two people can have very different outcomes. It’s pointless to compare yourself with others, wondering why you cannot make something work yet others seem to do so easily.
I like the way American writer Max Ehrmann put it in his classic poem Desiderata. “If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.”
So be gentle with yourself. Work hard and do your very best. That’s all you can do. The rest is up to the universe.
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