Throughout my elementary school years, getting good grades came fairly easily to me, which was more or less the only part that mattered to my parents. I would also repeatedly hear from both teachers and fellow students alike how intelligent they thought I was (I remember them dubbing me “The Living Dictionary” at one point for my natural spelling prowess, a fact which I’ll probably regret sharing). In truth, my days rarely consisted of much more than doing whatever was needed to get through school so that I could go home and play, but since everyone else was happy with the results, so was I.

By the time I got to junior high school, it had become firmly entrenched in my mind that all I really had to do was show up; that the good grades would follow and everyone would be happy. But I began to discover that it was no longer quite that simple. Elementary school had taught me that ‘homework’ was something you did on the bus ride to and from school; as far as I was concerned, getting home meant that it was quitting time, plain and simple. In junior high, however, those little assignments started to turn into projects, which required a bit more work than I could finish on the bus. Nevertheless, despite the increased difficulty I managed to keep my grades up without changing my approach too much, and everyone was still happy. So I left junior high school pretty much the same way I entered it: just going through the motions.

Of course, things became even more complicated in high school. The workload got heavier; I started having to choose some of my classes for myself; counselors were meeting with students to help them figure out which colleges to apply to and which majors to consider. And there I was, amidst all this chaos, trying to make decisions based entirely on the same old idea of getting good grades, the only context I had ever known.

Needless to say, those grades began slipping. My parents weren’t happy with it, but the only response they could offer at the time was to ‘try harder’. And I wanted to, but I had literally never had to apply much effort to anything I had ever done before, so breaking my lifelong habit of just going through the motions was next to impossible. I mean how in the world was I supposed to identify a solution (especially without any specific guidance to speak of) when I hardly understood the precise nature of the problem in the first place?

Right now, I’m a little hard-pressed to explain exactly how it is that I ever graduated from high school at all. But by some miracle, I did. Damn near with honors, in fact. It certainly wasn’t a desire to get good grades though, that’s for sure. As much as I didn’t want to disappoint my parents, once I got a taste of doing so, I discovered that it wasn’t quite enough of a deterrent in itself to get me to overcome my underachieving ways. If I had to guess, finding a way through it might have had a lot to do with not wanting to get left behind by my friends. Actually, now that I think about it, that probably had everything to do with it.

In any case, it wasn’t until I moved away for college that my ‘bare minimum’ approach finally blew up in my face. With my parents nowhere around to keep tabs on me and all of my high school friends off at different schools, the few incentives I’d previously had for getting at least decent grades were gone. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was completely lost the moment I set foot on campus. With each passing semester, my class attendance would incrementally drop right along with my grades. Ultimately, it took 5 years, 4 different majors, and $30,000 worth of student loans for my GPA to drop low enough to land me on academic suspension, but the outcome was inevitable.

So I suddenly found myself back at home with all the time in the world, yet not a single idea what to do with it. With my newfound free time, I didn’t have much choice but to really ponder what I wanted to do in life, something I had never (ever) previously done in any great detail. Naturally, I hadn’t the slightest clue where to even begin, and it took several months for me just to come up with a few solid ideas. But, for once, I was actually trying to make decisions from a context other than getting good grades, and the number of options available to me seemed to grow exponentially as a result.

I actually have a friend whose son recently experienced similar difficulty, the difference being that academic suspension found him after his very first semester in college. When I asked my friend what it was that her son wanted to do in life, she replied that his goal was to get into the college’s prestigious school of business. I then asked her what she intended to do to help him get back on track, to which she responded “stay on him and push him harder.” At that moment, I felt as though I knew exactly what the problem was.

I can’t say with complete certainty of course, but I’d be willing to bet that my friend’s son would benefit greatly from a paradigm shift similar to the one I experienced after my academic suspension. What I learned during my time in virtual limbo was that my scholastic struggles weren’t the result of a lack of goals, but rather a lack of passions. More specifically, the problem with having a goal of getting good grades was that its motivational value was so superficial that I always had to push myself to try to get there. In stark contrast, when you look within yourself to find a pursuit that aligns with who you are on the deepest levels, no amount of pushing is necessary because your passion does all of the pulling for you.

In my case, the passions I’ve discovered have ranged from learning about computers to playing poker to taking care of my family. And while it’s probable that my passions will change over the course of my life, having one at all is what’s most important. So if I ever have children (which, I admit, is a very big ‘if’), you can rest assured that they’ll never waste a single day pondering something as trivial as the quality of their grades, because they’ll know good and well that if they focus on finding their passion, the rest will take care of itself.

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