Care Less

The great NFL receiver Cooper Kupp posted a reel recently talking about not caring what happens during his games: not caring if he drops a ball, misses a rout, falls short of the first down or goal line. He doesn’t care because he knows he’s done everything he can to prepare himself: he practiced, he trained, he studied the playbook. He did all those things in the days and weeks leading up to Sunday to let the game be the game. If failure happened on the field, it didn’t matter; he shrugged it off and moved on to his next routine, route and play—good or bad.

It's the same way with tests of all kinds. The results don’t matter. Each question is its own world, its own moment. All the things that you should have cared about came before that moment: the study, the practice, the focus, the growth. Then when the moment arrives, you take your best shot and move on. 

Especially now as more exams are becoming adaptive, i.e. succeeding questions are based on if you answered the preceding question correctly, or succeeding sections are based on how well you did on the previous section, it is vital that students care less. If you take each question personally or let your perceived result linger in your mind, that feeling will only erode your performance on subsequent questions. 

It’s harder on tests because unlike, say, a play in football, we don’t immediately know our results. That is why in practice we must avoid becoming too dependent on the answers. That’s why we also ought to learn to care less: stop looking at answer keys right away, rushing to see our scores, worrying about results instead of the process. 

Come game day, you are what you are. Ideally, you’re going into a test feeling, “I’ve got this,” and then letting the chips fall as they may, shrugging off the bumps and taking the wins in stride. Either way, the clock moves and the test happens. 

Care less; prepare more.