" I did surprisingly well. The T.A. even asked for a copy of my paper. The thing is, I made it all up. I did it the night before."
I did surprisingly worse than I expected. I spent the majority of the weekend working on the paper. I did not make any of it up.
This is the Undergraduate Condition.
It takes a while to learn the tricks of the academic trade.
Much can be learned from a musical about Twelve Year Old kids in a Spelling Bee:
"Life is Random and Unfair. Life is Pandemonium. That's the reason we despair. Life is Pandemonium - It is such a Calamity. Where should we begin? The best spellers don't necessarily win."
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Usually when people say that they "made it all up" and "just did it the night before" they're full of shit. They're just trying to sound like they don't need to work hard to achieve greatness. Like certain people at Randolph who would say they didn't go over their song or character work and were so worried about their performance, and then accepting raves afterwards. It's about ego.
So you are saying Hard work = success then?
I can't say it always does because there are situations in which people work their asses off but can't seem to get anywhere. (see Match Point for the importance of luck.) My comment was merely about those people who try to be modest about the amount of work they put into something successful to make others feel bad about themselves.
I agree with Nick. Saying shit like "I did it the night before and I made it all up"...there's an agenda there, which is "I'm naturally brilliant! I don't even have to try!" Well maybe they don't, but I know I do, and so do most people I know.
On luck, yes, I believe that people can be lucky; but luck is not reliable. And you don't need to depend on luck, you can write good papers.
While not exactly this topic, here is what Michel Foucault had to say about working hard, failure, and beginning again.
"As to those for whom to work hard, to begin and begin again, to attempt and be mistaken, to go back and rework everything from top to bottom, and still find reason to hesitate from one step to the next – as to those, in short, for whom to work hard in the midst of uncertainty and apprehension is tantamount to failure, all I can say is that clearly we are not from the same planet."
Michel Foucault
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