Underline Less!!

When was the last time you underlined a text in a book to highlight the importance of it? Me?? I can't remember, maybe in my B.Tech 1st year before the COVID pandemic hit and I bought my first second-hand laptop. So not in 6 years - until I started reading again recently.

Then I remembered my 10th class days - those were the days we were all glued to our textbooks grinding everything over and over again, didn't we? I used to underline paragraph after paragraph, sometimes I was genuinely confused about why the hell I underlined that line, when I read the textbook again during revision.

One day, my teacher flipped through my book, saw all those underlined paragraphs, and explained the importance of underlining. He said: don't underline everything - underline the word or two that actually carries the meaning. It helped me study better, and I followed that through BTech 1st year - until my laptop and smartphone replaced the need for a textbook, simply through PDFs.

Now that I think about it, it hits differently - how a simple tweak in approach can make all the difference in studying better. It made me think about life too - we all try to do things that are meant to change us, but we burn out or exhaust ourselves halfway through. For instance, I started going to the gym 5 days a week. I kept it up for 2 months - then my body got burned out and all that work went to waste over the next 2 months. So I switched to 3 days a week, and my body feels better than ever.

If something isn't working, it doesn't mean you can't do it - it just means you haven't found your version of it yet. Sometimes all it takes is underlining less.