I strongly believe that how you do one thing is how you do everything. The amount of effort you put into one area of your life, and your attention to detail, is likely consistent with how you execute all of your undertakings. It’s the beat to your internal drum –  your philosophy.

At first, while studying for the Dental Tooth-Anatomy Midterm, I was trying to figure out what questions the teacher was most likely to ask. With this outlook, I was looking through the material that was presented, and trying to rank it in order of importance.

I happened to be in the library, and as I walked by two of my classmates, Alicia Jackson and Sergey Gazarov, I saw them working on some very obscure eruption patterns of the teeth — purely numbers. I asked them if they thought these questions would even come up on our midterm. “If they do, we’ll be ready for them,” they said.

So instead of assigning these obscure facts as unimportant and moving on to the materials we were guaranteed to be tested on, these particular students took the time to perfectly commit this to memory. Having some inside knowledge into the fact that they were both top students, I decided to take on their philosophy about studying.

It became a game as I created an absolutely unique way to remember these eruption patterns by folding all 10 of my fingers in a way I cannot even describe with words. It only took a few minutes to master, and then I went on to teach the technique to several other classmates in the library — I was too excited not to.

I systematically studied, rehearsed, and committed to memory absolutely anything that was presented about the topic at hand. I then looked at previous Board Examination questions for everything I could find from 2009 to 1998, which was hundreds of questions, very similar to what was going to be on the test.

By this point I was very confident. Sergey was also very much on point, so we sat together until almost 4 in the morning bouncing questions back and forth. He would quiz me, I would quiz him, and anything that was even slightly ambiguous would be combated by a witty mnemonic, or a more thorough understanding of why something was possible.

Going into the test at 8 in the morning I felt like I was bringing a machine gun to a fist fight. I had all the information locked up in my head and was radiating with confidence that any variation of anything that could possibly be asked was easily accessible to me.

The studying was purely overkill. However, if I kept telling myself that I want to learn enough to answer the questions, I would have been at a huge disadvantage. This could certainly be applied to anything that you do in life, anything that needs preparation, and anything that deserves to be done with love and diligence.

It should also be noted that students that spend time together develop similar GPAs. Likely due to the way they manage their studying, which stems from their philosophy. Philosophy most definitely rubs off on people, so whatever it is you’re going after in life, see if you can hang with the people that have the overkill philosophy.

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