Ever wish you could go back and relive High School or College with all the knowledge and confidence that you have now? Well I do, so I thought I’d try to impart some hard-earned wisdom to those of you that are just starting out your college careers to help you make your time a more memorable experience.
1. Everyone else is just as nervous as you!
All the others in your dorm are just like you. New to college, first time away from home, in a strange place. Here’s a secret to life: most people you meet are so worried about themselves that they don’t have time to even notice your flaws. And everyone there is just as desperate as you to be liked, and accepted.
So with that in mind your goal in the first few weeks should be simply to be friendly and make others feel comfortable. If you can do that you will have more friends then you have time. You will be the holder of a commodity more precious than gold to a college freshman: solace from the fear of rejection.
And here’s the great part. By focusing on making others feel comfortable, it will shift your consciousness away from yourself, away from your own flaws, and thus make you more confident and less nervous. That in itself should make you immediately more outgoing and personable. And having a tangible goal will also make the social interactions much easier.
Hilarious College Freshmen Memes, like to unlock!
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2. Befriend the hot girl, and don’t try to sleep with her.
Want to get invited to tons of parties? Want to be the most popular guy in your circle of friends? Befriend the hot girls.
It is a irrefutable law of nature that a hot girl will have at least six hot friends(along with 1.354 fat friends). So your goal in your first few weeks will be to befriend the hot girls, and have no ulterior motives.
When your goal is to simply befriend a girl, all of the pressure is off! The nervousness is gone. You’re just being friendly. Who cares. What, is she going to reject a friendly person? And girls will sense this too and it will instantly set you apart from the legions of other guys trying to get their first “college hookup”. Girls are many times more insecure than guys, so if you can make a girl feel comfortable and accepted in a strange new place you will be her instant best friend.
The payoff of having hot girls as friends comes later down the line, as they start inviting you to their parties/sorority events and introduce you to all of their hot friends. It is infinitely easier to start dating a girl if you are introduced by mutual friends who speak highly of you than it is to try to date a girl you randomly met at a party or bar. It’s simple social proof.
Follow points 1 and 2 and you’ll be the most popular guy in your dorm in a matter of weeks.
3. Say yes to everything
There is always some random thing going on, especially in the first few weeks of school. Everytime someone asks you to go to something. Say yes and go.
Because here’s the thing. You never know who you can potentially meet or what opportunities may arise. But you do know that if you sit inside all night that your chances of making some interesting new friends are about nil.
In college friends are like currency. The more friends you have the more interesting opportunities will be open to you and the more experiences will be available. GO OUT. DO EVERYTHING.
4. Set aside the first six hours of your day for being productive and stick to it
With college comes freedom and free time. A whole truckload of freedom and freetime that most of you won’t know what to do with. So if you don’t create discipline and set aside time for yourself early on it’s very likely that you’ll just do what everyone else does. Drink a lot, party a lot, get fat, fail your courses.
If that future sounds amenable then you’re probably reading the wrong website 🙂
In order to really succeed in college(and life) you really need to set aside the first six hours of your day and mark it off as your own. This is the time where you’ll workout, read great books, and get all of your school work done.
Another irrefutable law of nature is that in college productivity after 6pm will never happen(unless you have no friends, but we don’t want that either). There will always be something awesome to distract you from what you need to do, so get things done early in the day so that you can fully live it up at night with no regrets.
5. Take advantage of all the time you have
You will never have more free time in your life as you do in college. Not even close. So take advantage of that time.
In my opinion the real value of college is not the formal education you get, but what you can do with the time that you have. It’s fine to party. It’s great to hang out with friends. Developing fantastic social skills will benefit you enormously throughout the rest of your life. But don’t neglect other areas either.
Read great books. One common thread that ties together most of the world’s most successful people is that they read. And they read a lot. Reading one book a week during college will set you roughly 400 books ahead of 99% of those that you graduate with. Imagine having that much more knowledge than everyone else in your age group. That is a tremendous advantage.
Develop healthy lifestyle habits. This again is an area that will not only set you apart but benefit you for the rest of your life. College is the time that will solidify your habits and thus dictate whether you become obese in twenty years or look and feel fantastic.
6. Goals, goals, goals!
Having so much time and freedom can lead to a sort decision overload that leads you rather paralyzed and instead of doing anything productive wasting your days aimlessly surfing the net and just hanging out with people with no objectives.
So to ensure that you don’t fall into this indecision paralysis you need to set very clear and precise goals.
Set end of the semester goals for:
- Your fitness level
- Your GPA
- Your social goals
- Your self-development goals
Read these goals daily. Ask yourself whether the things you’re doing are bringing you closer to or further away from those goals. And then act. The journey of life is an easier trip when you know your destination.