Running header: HABIT FOR SUCCESS

Habits For Success Josh Pease California State University Chico English 130

Running header: HABIT FOR SUCCESS Coming into Chico the first day as a student I was, like everyone else, nervous how these next four years will change me, hopefully better, as a person. I have always been a man with a daily routine, always having to be comfortable with where I am and how I do things. This was my main worry: how am I going to feel comfortable in this college town? On the first day of English we looked at Nancy Ratliffs Framework for Success. She stated the 8 habits one must acquire for success are curiosity, openness, engagement, creativity, persistence, responsibility, flexibility, and metacognition. When we had to pick one of these to chose, I reflected on my past of always doing things the same way. Thats why I picked flexibility for my main habit for success. The more one person can be flexible to their environment and make the best of it for themselves will always have the upper hand. Over the course of the past few months of my first semester, I have used all of these habits for success academically, socially, and personally. The three most important habits one must acquire to be successful are flexibility, engagement, and responsibility.

As I stated in the introduction, flexibility is the main habit you must form in order to be successful in life. The perfect condition to work or think will rarely, if ever, be there for you. The situation does not change in order to fit an individuals needs, its the exact opposite. It could be the situation when you need to study for a big midterm in a quiet area, but there is no such thing as that in a college dorm. You could be faced with having to run to the library before class because the printer isnt working. Or maybe your roommate is snoring an excessive amount while you need to write a paper due the next day. Flexibility is accepting the hand youre dealt and changing with it.

Running header: HABIT FOR SUCCESS

The second habit I chose was engagement. Engagement is a sense of investment and involvement in learning. Math has always been my best subject in school, its been my favorite because no matter what the problem is, there is only one answer. Other than that, I have not been able to fully immerse in my education. I saw it as just a steppingstone to the next stage in my life. This all had changed in my senior year in my social justice class. My teacher, Mr. Paktakhan, knew we were in a transitional stage in our lives. We knew we were not going to be engaged in school at all that year, including English. He taught me how to always be thinking in the present and that nothing else mattered. While we can never been completely present and learn from our surroundings, he taught me, an eighteen-year-old thinking about nothing but the freedom of college, that his class was actually important. At the end of the year it had hit me that I learned more in that class than I have anywhere else. I was able to enjoy life more only simply because I engaged my self in what I was doing at that moment and nothing else. I have been able to use this to my advantage. Instead of spending my class time thinking about what I was going to do with my friends later, I mentally stay in class and I do take things away from classes every time. The third habit that while I still have a long way to fully acquire, I have made a lot of progress in the past months is responsibility. Ratliff says responsibility is the ability to take ownership of ones actions and understand the consequences of those actions for oneself and others. As most teenagers are, I couldnt even count on myself to complete some tasks. I had taken the thought that my teachers or parents would be able to help me and pick me up, but as Joe Doty explained, Authority refers to who is in charge, while responsibility refers to who is accountable (Doty 2012). I was blissfully unaware what

Running header: HABIT FOR SUCCESS my behavior could have possibly got me into with out the help of my elders. Whether it was my lack of concentration or not realizing my full responsibility, I couldnt seem to

grasp the importance of things. In these past few months I have been able to make myself be more academically focused. In the last few weeks leading up to moving to college, my parents slowly began lowering restrictions on me, knowing I was soon to be the one with all the decisions. I explained my stance on my new responsibilities in our first assignment, talking about my alarm clock. This clock has changed me into being a more responsible person by getting me up early. It will be one of the few things I can count on these first few weeks of my first college semester (Pease 2013). Over the past few months I have still been trying to find my responsibility with most things, but I have made much progress and am proud that not only me, but my friends can count on me too. Curiosity had me going to multiple club meetings and joining rush week the first month of school. While I didnt join any clubs and I decided not to pledge, I found that I still had a legitimate learning experience. Like J.A. Litman explained curiosity, the desire for new knowledge or experience (Litman 2006). In high school I experienced some of the best times Ive ever had, hanging out with my friends everyday that I have known my whole life and playing football every fall. While that was always fun competing and hanging out, I wanted to branch out and try new things from my daily routine. I always heard stories from my older sisters of all the fun times they had in Chico and I wanted to experience that for myself. My curiosity has led me to try many new things with my friends, from pulling all-nighters to going to the gym every day. I definitely feel I have changed a person through my newfound curiosity.

Running header: HABIT FOR SUCCESS Ratliff defines curiosity as the ability to use novel approaches to generating, investigating, and representing ideas defines curiosity. My writing coming into college has been creative, I often used analogies and metaphors in my papers I had before. I first

began using creativity in a summer class designed to help my SAT score improve. I used metaphors and analogies in order to brighten up my paper, with the occasional allusion. My junior year I was able to get my first A using these tools, but as time went by I resorted to my old writing, as I was just trying to get a passing grade. I did not fully recover my creative writing until my love letter to my tree. Thinking of my girlfriend, I wrote I can remember the first time I stared into those light blue eyes of yours, much like the time the Chico State gardener first planted this shrub (Pease 2013). I was able to find my creativity by comparing two beautiful things. While the dwarf pittosporum might look like a normal hedge to most people, I was able to interpret the bush as something more than most people see it. I believe my flexibility will only help me in the future, giving me more and more opportunities to make friends and acquaintances. Flexibility is the ability to adapt to situations, expectations or demands according to Ratliff. Flexibility, Ive found, is most demanded from a college student during finals week. With four different finals and a paper due in such a small amount of time, I personally have had to juggle my time and make sacrifices in order to be able to study. According to C Cheng, undergoing stressful life transitions, individuals who are more flexible in coping, compared with those who are less flexible in coping, report lower anxiety levels, lower depression levels, and less stress-related symptoms such as proneness to worry and exhaustion (Cheng 2011). One week before my business final, our professor had given us a study guide complete with

Running header: HABIT FOR SUCCESS all the readings we had the whole semester. After figuring out that many of the links on the guide were not working the night before the test, many of my fellow classmates had frantically emailed the professor wondering what happened. The whole class began stressing more than they should have for a beginning business final. I was able to keep a cool head and found the links to the articles and helped my fellow classmates with no worry. I came into the test room and left it very comfortably. I started to experience openness in college for the first time when I expanded my friend group. It was so easy at first to hang out with all of the people I came to Chico

with from my hometown. It was even easier due to the fact that my roommate is from the same town. I quickly learned that if I didnt start talking to other people, it would be too late soon to meet new people. Luckily I was able to make friends with a lot of people, including some whom I will live with next year. As I found myself becoming more and more flexible as well as open, I found that I was gaining confidence, and with that confidence I was able to expand my horizon and I became much more curious. One key trait I have had since I was a child has been staying on a task no matter how hard it is. This trait of persistence I have has undoubtedly come from my dad. As a small 6 foot 1, 170 pounds for a linebacker, he fought and worked his way to a scholarship to play football in college at St. Marys in Moraga, CA. I noticed how he came home every day from work, completely exhausted, yet completely satisfied because he knew he had done an honest days work, and thats how I have always looked up to him. My folly though has been that I have been persistent at almost everything I do, except for schoolwork. This has led to many a late night catching up on procrastinated studying. In college though, I had finally found my footing with writing when I had my

Running header: HABIT FOR SUCCESS big paper due in Business class. I did this by effectively giving my self a set calendar for when and what I would be doing on the paper, with how much I should read every night and taking down notes. Two weeks, a 300-page biography of Sam Walton, two documentaries on Wal-Mart, and countless notes later I had the first big paper due in college done a week and a half early. While I cannot pull a quote from it to show what

persistence had helped me do, I do now have a template that I will for sure use the rest of college to get assignments done, including this one. The most important aspect of self-improvement is metacognition. If you dont look back at your actions or your thoughts to see what could have been better or what should have changed, you cannot learn from yourself. Ratliff describes metacognition as the ability to reflect on ones own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge. With the many, and I mean many, mistakes Ive made in the past, I have found it very helpful to look back and think about what I couldve done to make things better. Personal growth can only happen if you yourself let it. While writing my photo draft, I found that many places in my life are special, and I never have really looked at it that way. I began to remember how much my backyard meant to my childhood and my friends, and I looked back on all the fun times I had there. But I believe the one photo that made me really look back on the past was the picture of my dad and I on our backpacking trip we took over summer, I felt a sense of peace not being bombarded every second by media. It was if nothing else in the world mattered except for what was going on immediately around us (Pease 2013). I had a great time hiking with my dad and our friends, I learned a lot about them over those three days. I have always found it amazing that the greatest times you have somewhere or with some

Running header: HABIT FOR SUCCESS one can never be fully appreciated until its behind you. The one way to bring it back to life is to write about it and tell other people about your experience. At the beginning of writing this paper I believed that he three most important habits one must acquire to be successful are flexibility, engagement, and responsibility. After looking back at all of the habits though, they are all of equal importance. Looking forward into the fast paced, quickly growing society Im slowly getting prepared to be thrown in after college, Ive recognized the little time I have to be ready must be used

efficiently. Because as much as Id love college to last forever, the real world isnt going to wait for me to catch up.

Running header: HABIT FOR SUCCESS Works Cited

Cheng, C. , Wang, F. , & Golden, D. (2011). Unpacking cultural differences in interpersonal flexibility: Role of culture-related personality and situational factors.Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 42(3), 425-444. This article discusses the cultural differences in interpersonal flexibility by examining the impact of culture on interpersonal flexibility. Silvia, J.P., Litman, J.A., (2006). The latent structure of trait curiosity: evidence for interest and deprivation curiosity dimensions. Personality Assessment. 86. 318328. Pease, J.A. (2013) http://joshpease.weebly.com/my-alarm-clock.html Pease, J.A. (2013) http://joshpease.weebly.com/the-love-letter.html

Pease, J.A. (2013) http://joshpease.weebly.com/photo-essay-draft.html Doty, J., Doty, C. (2012). Command responsibility and accountability. Military Review, 92, 35-38. The article reports, A commander can delegate authority but not responsibility. Authority refers to who is in charge, while responsibility refers to who is accountable (p. 36).

Running header: HABIT FOR SUCCESS

10