I believe in learning. And behind all that slogging for grades, what I really see is development of ability, and acquisition of skills. Grades and scores may be performance/progress indicators or checkpoints for me to assess my development, but in no way defining me.
When it comes to work, I absolutely believe that training is necessary – not so much developing our skills from scratch. No one can reverse all the bad habits of speech (eg. fillers, pet words, etc.) within a day or even a week but such training sessions serves to consolidate what we already know into one place and focus our application in various areas, often in a more disciplined manner. So many people I’ve come across in life have so much potential but the environment does not encourage them to shoot for the longer term goals of self-improvement, only the short-term objectives of completing the work on-hand.
At any workplace, there are only 2 kinds of things that you can take with you when you leave. One is your track record (project references, achievements) and the other is your skills. In every project, we should seek to emerge from each one more capable and being able to deliver more or better in the next one. We should never be falling back on something we have already done. In other words, the only way to avoid becoming too comfortable with one’s position is to keep focusing on potential. And that means, while there is the 2 kinds of takeaways – what we should be putting our attention on is our skills.
Therefore, hurry to brush up skills and pull up socks, not to meet deadlines (though that eventually must be met anyways).