Handicapped at the start

Great. Now I'm already behind. Not by much, but I'm still behind.

AMO

This year, I was invited to partake in the Australian Mathematical Olympiad (AMO), a 2 day, 4 hour per day long maths olympiad competition. Even though I felt I did ok, my, did it feel so painful, sitting through a total of 8 hours, just staring at these 8 problems which, for me, were quite hard to solve.

Background Info

Basically this competition is an invite-only olympiad, with generally only the best, young mathematicians in the country invited to join. That begs the question, how did I end up here? To be fair, I won't downplay that I'm good at maths, but compared to the other people that take this as well, I'm average at best.

This would also be my 3rd time doing the competition, following up from my participation in Years 9 and 10, and this time I was the only student from my school doing it.

The Hassle

The thing about AMO is that, given it is a total of 8 hours, and that the test is sat during school hours, I do have to sacrifice a lot of learning time just to do it. Our school's periods are short (40 minutes), and AMO takes up a combined total of 10 periods of class in just 2 days. Every year, I've felt so far behind at the start of the school year because of this, whilst my classmates are properly learning VCE subjects, I'm doing some maths comp which I'm barely good at.

I never trained to become a "pro" maths olympiad guy, so revising this type of content to me felt like just extra, unnecessary burden.

An Unfair Advantage

However, I did feel some motivation to do well here. First, I was the only one doing it at the school, so representing my school was a big honour and I felt I should therefore do my best. Second, I was invited to do it, I didn't want to be that one guy that hogs up a spot just to tilt immediately, even though there may be others who feel more deserving of a place.

But the major motivation was that maths, is literally my only strong suit. Sure I might be decent at other things, like science, sport and having a social life. But maths is the one reason why I can stand out from others. And not utilising this one unfair advantage I had over others felt like a wasted opportunity to me. I have friends who are in the Firsts (top team) for sports, have many different leadership roles and insane musical abilities. But I have none of that, the only thing I have is maths and that gave me some extra desire to do well.

Habits

As with every new school term, I try my best to work on improving my habits. I've learnt quite a bit from reading Atomic Habits, and the main point which I felt helped me the most was toying with friction.

Manipulating things that may give me an excuse to ignore something was probably the best way to build on my habits. For example: By placing having a bench and weights right in my study, I reduced the friction of having to get them and set them up, meaning recently I've been far more likely to just start doing some exercise. By hiding things like snacks, I increased the friction of having to get them just to eat, meaning I cut down on the amount of junk food I've been eating recently.