Here we lay out a few quotations and illustrations, along with some brief explanations where necessary, to help motivate students for 15 difficult situations ( such as facing an essential examination, procrastination, resisting peer pressure, addiction to social media, worry, lacking Talent, and so on) they are now commonly facing.
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15 Motivational Quotes for Students With Explanations
- “I dislike studying or training for my goal.”
“Don’t Quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.”- Muhammad Ali.
Hardships and discomfort is a given factor when you set out on something new, meaningful, and positively life-altering.
You are solely not the only one that has to go through this process; everyone goes through it!
But only some succeed, as they strive to work on their goals keeping all the discomfort aside. That’s a big difference, and in most cases, the only.
- “Procrastination is a big reason for my slow growth and I often fall prey for it.”
“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”- Martin Luther King.
“Procrastination is the thief of time, collar him.”
– Charles Dickens, David Copperfield.
Things will develop for the worse if you keep setting your work to be done later. If the task you are performing is unavoidable, then act now.
Stop getting lost in your thoughts and zoning out if you are not ticking off important tasks in your never-ending to-do list. The bottom line is if all those pending works don’t get done, you don’t get to achieve anything – big or small.
Most of the time, you are clueless about how and when to start, especially when it’s a complex, overwhelming task in hand. In such situations, what you can do is divide the task into small subtasks that are manageable and start doing them one by one.
It is up to you to make it happen. The beginning is in your hands.
- “Even after working hard, I don’t end up with satisfactory results.”
“Giving up is the only sure way to fail.”- Gena Showalter.
“Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.”- Denis Waitley.
You can’t always expect to have the same, satisfactory, cookie-cutter result for every action of yours. Life is unpredictable.
No matter what you do, it can always lead you up to unexpected lows and highs. However, that does not mean you will compromise on your hard work.
Luck can’t always guarantee you success. It’s your efforts that will increase your chances to succeed even if you fail once or twice in the process.
- “It’s hard to keep myself away from social media/phone and they are pretty invasive.”
“You might have dozens of likes on Instagram but that is not going to pay your bills.”- Anonymous.
Statistics show that in the United States, teens from the age 13 to 18year olds spend almost 7 hours every day consuming media on screens (laptops, smartphones, and tablets), and demographics of 8 to 12yearolds, more than four and a half hours.
The only advice is to avoid distractions, social media, and procrastination as much as possible.
We only 24 hours a day, and it’s entirely up to us on how and where we spend these hours. You should not complain if you habitually struggle to meet deadlines or end up delivering low-quality results.
- “I feel like my classmates and peers are more talented than me and I’m not exceptionally good at anything.”
“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”- Stephen King.
In the following, I’ll mention some examples of famous personalities- Michael Jordan was a human with an incredible work ethic.
Will Smith worked hard on his craft. Harder than any of his peers.
So did Mozart and Charles Darwin.
And now the world believes them to be exceptionally capable and gifted!
Studies show that grit and deliberate practice is a form of practice in which you push your limits just beyond your current skill level and seek critical feedback on mistakes made. These practices are far more important than just Talent to become an expert in any field.
So, it doesn’t matter if your famous peers are more talented than you in the initial stages. You can surpass them with hard work and effort.
Your peer may appear to be more natural than you. For example, say, your peer is amazing at math, but you can get be better than her or him if you work hard and seek improvements consistently over a while.
- “It’s hard to resist peer pressure.”
“I’t better to walk alone than with flowing with the crowd like in a cattle which is approaching a pack of wolves. You are a human not a sheep.”- Anonymous.
Motivation quote – It’s difficult, but you have to try resisting peer pressure, and you can if you try hard enough.
Before joining the bandwagon and follow every move your peer does, you also need to weigh and analyze what’s good for you in the medium to long term. It’s not logical that you’ll be good at whatever your peer does and vice versa. Do what you are good at, and don’t obsessively focus on what your peers are doing.
- “I’m caught in a loop. I can’t change my life.”
“Your past does not equal your future.”- Tony Robbins.
“When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”- Alexander Graham Bell.
The only way to escape this loop is for you to want it bad enough.
Your past can be compared to water under the bridge; it flows by. But on the contrary, tomorrow is like a new wave building in the ocean. You can always change things when you decide to, and it can be the very next moment.
Remember, one opportunity goes, another comes. But, we cry over the lost opportunity for so long that we usually fail to notice the new. We need to quickly focus and get over the one we missed, and brace ourselves up for the new waves collectively forming in the ocean.
Of course, at the beginning of our career, things will start slow. So slow that you’d feel your static. With the change in mindset and work ethics, we can reach every possible height we can dream of.
Your belief and mindset are critical in making the change happen, and it can be flipped in a moment.
- “I get nervous and anxious on a big platform.”
“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”- Eleanor Roosevelt.
“The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”- Nelson Mandela.
A piece of advice on this issue can be, fake it till you make it. Surprisingly, people can’t tell the difference between being confident or acting confident when you are presenting something to a large audience.
Asking you not to be anxious and inject a sudden boost of confidence is a useless piece of advice. There is no way you can subdue your fear before approaching a stage so embrace it. And once you embrace it, you will realize that the challenges were not as distasteful as you imagined.
However, first, perform the challenge at a much smaller scale and gradually increase your confidence before moving to the biggest stage. For example, if you have to make a speech to an audience of 500 people, start with a speech to five of your friends, then twenty-odd strangers, and so on.
- “I over-think, over-analyse and worry a lot.”
“Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.”
– Napoleon Bonaparte.
“Thinking too much leads to paralysis by analysis. It’s important to think things through, but many use thinking as a means of avoiding action.”
– Robert Herjavek.
You have to keep in mind that it’s only your imagination or expectation that certain things may go wrong in the future, right.
Imagination or expectation isn’t a peek at all the things that might happen in the future. It is all in your head!
So if it’s only your imagination, then why can’t you kill and end it?
In reality, you tend to suffer and torture yourself much more from your worries and over-thinking than when those thoughts come true. They drain and exhaust your limited energy and will power for a task and considerably reduce your productivity.
Robin Sharma, the author of the bestseller The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, in his book, talks about the worry-fact-finding exercise of a business executive who participated in his leadership coaching program.
There we see that 54% of his worries were related to things that would likely never happen; 26% were about all the past actions that could not be changed; 8% were related to all the opinions and suggestions of people whose inputs have no significance to him; 4% were concerned personal health issues that he had, and only 6% of his worries concerning him were real issues worthy of his attention.
So we agree with the lopsided proportion of worries that are worth worrying about. Try noting down your worries over more than a year, and you will find that very few of them came true. Run this exercise, and you will realize how much mental energy you are wasting.
- “I just failed on executing a big task, I let everybody down.”
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”- Winston Churchill.
“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”- Robert F. Kennedy.
If you are trying anything worthwhile, you will fail several times. Everyone does.
The key is to learn from those mistakes and take it as a lesson not to repeat them.
- “I have to combat an important exam.”
“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.”- Maya Angelou.
“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”- Winston Churchill.
When you are stuck on something, when you start getting frustrated, when progress is hardly visible, keep reminding yourself that you are not the only one stuck in such a loop, which is frustrating and as you are not making progress. All the others beside you are in the same boat.
If you are among the ones who can find their way, they will depart their peers far behind despite these disappointments.
And lastly, if you keep working hard and keep learning from your mistakes, you will eventually achieve your goals even if you fail multiple times in the process.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, the renowned American astrophysicist, highlights the same issue in his commencement speech at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
- “I fear pursuing and dreaming about big goals because I can’t possibly achieve them.”
“Too many of us die at twenty and are buried at eighty”- Robin Sharma.
“Don’t ever let someone tell you that you can’t do something. You got a dream, you gotta protect it.”- The Pursuit of Happiness, Chris Gardner (Will Smith).
Try to kick out such negative thoughts. If you feel embarrassed when it comes to asking for something, if you think you will make a fool out of yourself if you pursue a tricky goal, and if you hope you will reach your goals somehow, then you are making certain that your goals will remain unfulfilled.
It would be best if you pursued them. You need to chase them, and you need to hustle. You have to take proactive steps. You have to forget about opinions that may form an obstacle in your path.
Most people lead short lives because they think and assume that their abilities don’t match big goals. They play it safe. These limiting beliefs and dreamless lives are precisely why you might end up never pursuing you, let alone achieving them. And if you don’t pursue your vital goals, you die along with your passion and dream much before your biological death.
And there are several logical reasons why you should pursue big goals.
Most people shy away from audacious, larger than life goals because they believe that their meager selves cannot accomplish them. Only a ‘certain category’ of personalities can achieve them. This inferiority complex leeches onto masses, destroying the dreams of most people.
We humans often underestimate what we are capable of.
Also, a gigantic goal will motivate and activate you much more than the ordinary ones.
How many of you would have been motivated to raise money for charity to feed the street children of your locality? And how many would dedicate their entire life to humanitarian acts and be able to save millions from dying of starvation?
Won’t you work harder and with way more dedication for the second goal? It’s way bigger and more motivating.
- “Luck never seems to be in my favour.”
“I have found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often.”- Brian Tracy.
“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”- Thomas Jefferson.
Working hard and taking chances and risks make you lucky, as Richard Wiseman, Professor of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, has shown through his research on this subject. In Wiseman’s book, The Luck Factor: The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind, he tells about basic principles lucky people follow to get lucky is taking risks and working hard.
Therefore, proving that if you are not lucky, it’s probably because you are not working hard enough.
- “I plan a lot, but end up not acting upon them.”
“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”- Zig Ziglar.
“Action is the foundational key to all success.”- Pablo Picasso.
If the plan is big, you should start with baby steps. Big corporates such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Disney all started in a garage. Facebook was a domestic website started with the only bunch of uni students at Harvard University as it’s users.
Identify a single step that you can take today, and start your journey.
- “I am rarely happy.”
“To change ourselves effectively, we first had to change our perceptions.”- Stephen R. Covey.
“Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.”- Oprah Winfrey.
A change in perspective can lead you up to a path of happiness. Success doesn’t assure happiness. Even billionaires and the most powerful ones are unhappy. So the quest for happiness is a lonely one, but hold on to it once you find it.
Conclusion
These quotations related to these issues sum up why few succeed, and the majority do not. Be the one to change and not the one who waits for it.