Think. Before you Do.

So often I have seen people rushing into their preparation without the correct strategy. I get it. Doing stuff feels great. It makes you feel like you’re making progress. But what if you are driving a fast car onto an oncoming lane? NBA Hall of Famer John Wooden said it best – “Don’t Mistake Activity for Achievement”. Do you know people who have been trying to crack banking exams for 2 or 3 years without luck? I sure do. And all of them tell me the same thing- “Supriyo, I’m working harder than I ever did and still my luck doesn’t seem to change” There are too many people who curse their luck and never strategize, trying the same strategy over and over. They keep doing. Never course correcting. Never learning from failure. Now don’t get me wrong. Luck definitely plays a vital part in these exams owing to the sheer number of variables involved. But it’s not all luck. It’s about taking the right mix of tools and sculpting your destiny. If you craft the correct strategy and push with all your might, lady luck will smile in the end. She always does. Strategy is key. An elite sportsperson will devote hours to strategy-find out what to train, how to train and when to train before commencing the training itself.

Using an American concept in the Indian context

The United States Federal Government job openings mandate the usage of KSAs for hiring purposes. KSA stands for Knowledge, Skill and Ability. Candidates must write down their KSAs and these are used in conjunction with résumés to find the ideal candidates. While our Government jobs don’t explicitly ask you to write KSAs, the same principles are implicitly embedded into all standardized tests including the ones used by IBPS. We can learn about them and use them to our advantage. First, let’s understand the 3 parts of a KSA. Knowledge is something that you know about how to do something. For example, if you’re a cricket fan you know how  runs are scored in ODIs, you

“Don’t Mistake Activity for Achievement”
-John Wooden

know how to set the field, you know in which order the batsmen need to be sent to the field. Note that you might not have applied or acted out these things that you know. So what is Skill? Continuing with our cricket analogy, your capacity to hit a tennis ball for a six or your expertise to score in your local runs  community cricket ground is your Skill- something you have done previously and know how to repeat. That brings us to Ability. Taking the same analogy, it can be your potential to play in the district or national level cricket teams. You know you have the stamina and the dexterity required to play at a higher level than your local cricket club but it’s something that you have never experienced before. There is a thin line between the last two – Skill is something you did do while Ability is something you could do. KSAs are a vital key to success and recruiters often select the person who has all 3 to do a certain job. I will discuss more on how you can use KSAs during your exam in a later part of this article.

Know yourself before attempting to know the enemy

Before starting to analyze SBI PO, think a little about yourself. We are often so engrossed in the outer world that we forget to take a peek into our own selves. Ask yourself the following 3 questions.

“He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened.”
-Lao Tzu

1. What type of learner am I?

According to Neil Fleming’s VARK model there are 4 primary types of learners- Visual, Auditory, Reading/Writing and Kinesthetic. Personally I find that I’m most effective when I am writing and doing stuff. Kinesthetic learning appeals to me. My brother, on the other hand, never writes. To this day I fail to understand how he passed every exam with flying colors without the habit of writing. A friend of mine can’t work unless he has his earphones plugged in. Music stimulates his brain. What puts us “in the groove” is different for each one of us. The point behind this is to find yours. Understand your nature and create an environment in which you will naturally thrive.

2. Is this the most important thing in my life right now?

Do you really want to get into SBI? Is that your single most important goal right now? Most people just “kinda want to crack SBI PO”. They think it would be “sorta cool to work in SBI”. There are only a few who think about cracking this exam from the moment they get up to the moment they go to bed. An ancient saying states that you’re not serious about a goal until the day comes when even your dreams are about that very goal. If cracking SBI PO is not the most important thing for you, then you have already subconsciously accepted failure.

3. How many hours a day can I devote to my prep?

This is a vital component of prep. If your current circumstance leaves you with less than 4 hours to prepare for this exam on a daily basis the road gets much more tougher for you.

Working Individuals v/s Unemployed Grads

Let’s expound upon what I wrote in the last section. Take a look at the following graphs.

Calculation of your Baseline Metrics

The first thing I did when I decided to prepare for SBI PO is the following: I Googled for “free SBI PO mock tests” and gave the first one I could find. I gave this “cold mock” based upon the SBI PO prelims exam without any special preparation but made sure to stick to the defined time limit of 1 hour. What this helped me to do is gain an insight into my natural strengths and weaknesses. I found my strong and weak areas and made a note of it. After that I took a whole day and trawled the internet searching for strategies to gain an edge. I downloaded the previous year’s notification and read it fully. Then I watched multiple YouTube videos and read blogs related to strategy. Doing independent researching is invaluable. I went through dozens of articles from various sources and made notes on recommended books, apps, websites etc. For example, this is how I summed up App recommendations.

My apologies for torturing you to interpret my handwriting 🙂 

During this phase you must be careful to avoid “paid for” adverts. It’s best to make notes about recommended items and then cross verify them from other sources. In the next section I’ll give you my recommendations.

Encapsulating yourself in a Cocoon of Concentration

Once the research was in place, I decided to create what I called a “Cocoon of Concentration”- basically the idea was to force myself to study no matter where I was, whatever the environment or the platform I was using. I targeted a fourfold mechanism to always be in the zone – Books, Apps, YouTube Channels and Websites. I could read books while I was at my desk, use Apps/YouTube if I was feeling lazy and had my phone on me and look up websites when I was on my computer. I was working as a part time Freelancer during this time so this approach helped me stay in touch with preparation even while I was away from home, waiting for meetings to start etc.

Books

I bought different books during my prep. While I did not finish most of them cover to cover, the concepts I got from them proved to be crucial. Books help a lot in the initial phase of prep when you don’t know the types of questions that can be asked. They help you to create a mental structure and scope of the exam.

1. Quantitative Aptitude

If you are a beginner and need to get some foundational concepts then you can pick up The Comprehensive Guide to IBPS PO/MT by Disha Publications. The questions in this book are not tough but the advantage with buying it is that you get preliminary coverage on all 4 subjects from a single book. Another timeless book for conceptual clarity on quants is M. Tyra’s Magical Book on Quicker Maths. If you are naturally strong in Quant then you can directly jump to the advanced level Quants that Sarvesh K Verma challenges you with in Quantum Cat.  

For hardcore math geeks only

For Reasoning, begin with the Disha book that I wrote about earlier. If you want to supplement it, go for R S Aggarwal’s book. However, these books have become quite outdated due to the massive changes in pattern over the years. Two great books considering current trends are MK Pandey’s Analytical Reasoning and K.Kundan’s Magical Book on Puzzles. Having said that, I must mention that I found most books to be lacking compared to the difficulty level of the actual exam. So, along with books it is important to do a lot of mock tests to get the hang of the reasoning section. Also, you can check online for various free ebooks on reasoning. Bank Exams Today has a great collection of updated & free ebooks. Bankersadda regularly posts Reasoning Ability Practice Sets that are also good.

Best Puzzle book in the market

It’s difficult to recommend SBI PO-specific books for English as such targeted books are frankly not of much use. Improving your English skill does take a lot of time and no book can provide you a quick fix for that. The truth is, you either have a flair for English or don’t depending upon how you have been using the language from your school days up until now. The fastest way forward is learning by taking numerous mock tests. If you must buy books and have the time to invest in them, then I will recommend three for you. A timeless book for English is the Wren and Martin book which should be on your bookshelf regardless of whether you are appearing for any exams. Another evergreen book to build up your vocabulary is Norman Lewis’s Word Power Made Easy. To prepare for the Mains descriptive section you can grab a copy of Descriptive English by S P Bakshi & Richa Sharma. And hey, you are here reading an in-depth blog post, so this is also helping to develop your English skills! Keep Reading 🙂

Handy for Mains Exam

Apps

You will definitely spend a lot of time using Apps during your preparation. In my opinion, the apps you choose are more important than books because apps can dynamically adapt to the everyday changes happening with these exams. I tried dozens of apps and found most to be sub par. Here are the ones I liked the best, classified by category.

1. General All-Weather/All-Subject Apps

One App that should definitely be in your phone if you are an SBI PO/banking aspirant is Gradeup. It’s like a Facebook Feed, but for Competitive exams! I found myself taking the numerous mini tests that this App provides and even bought the mock tests which were of very high quality and great bang for your buck. You can keep track of exam news & notifications, cover daily current affairs, interact with fellow aspirants in the same boat and even be motivated by the amazing community there. This was definitely my most used app during prep. A warning though: It can get very addictive, so limit your interactions with the community and try to maximize taking tests, solving MCQs and attempting problems posted by the users without too much chit-chat. The BankersAdda app can also be used as an alternative as it has some stellar questions and daily updates. Use either one of the above but not both together to prevent wasting too much time. A third option is the Oliveboard app if you have bought their mocks. Their app is lacking in a few departments so you can use it in conjunction with any one of the above two.

2. General Awareness Focused App

I used two apps for keeping track of the GA section: OnlineTyari’s app and Test Book’s Current Affairs app. Both of them are updated daily and are very comprehensive. What I love about Online Tyari’s app is that you get thousands of GA questions that you can browse at your leisure. You can fire up a random session and keep attempting the MCQs even while you are resting on the couch and they will give you an accuracy count when you end the session. You can sort MCQs by month and by topics and repeat them as many times as you want to help you with retention. Its on-demand functionality, access to a vast question bank and intuitive UI design makes it hands down one of the best apps for aspirants. TestBook’s app supplements it with daily updates and quizzes.

3. Best Apps to improve English Skills

For many aspirants the English section is a huge bane. Don’t worry. Even people who seem to have been gifted with a command over English took many years to get to where they are. You’ll get there. You just need the right tools and you’ll get there faster than those who seem better than you now. Embrace the mentality of the growth mindset– Everything can be learned given adequate time and focused energy. There are two great apps to accentuate your vocabulary- Dictionary.com and Volt Vocabulary Learning. Dictionary.com helps you discover many new words and also provides interesting words of the day, while Volt is much more exam focused with lots of tests and memory tips and tricks. Another amazing app that can help you out is Learn English Podcasts. Its a lovely app developed by the British Council and has truly amazing audio content classified by episodes. The best thing about it is you can use this even when you are resting. Just plug in your headphones, close your eyes and listen. It will rapidly improve your diction and comprehension and will boost your confidence during the interview stage. If you have some more time then take a look at Learn English Grammar which is also quite decent.  

Embrace the mentality of the Growth Mindset- Everything can be learned given adequate time and focused energy

3. Other Misc. Apps

An app that helped me to improve my speed of doing Quants is Math Tricks. I highly recommend it if you feel your calculation skills aren’t quite up to par. The app’s challenge mode with steadily increasing difficulty will surely test even the best among you. Another app I used mostly when I was new to the bank exam job market is Sarkari Naukri Updates. It helped me keep track of new job notifications.

4. Productivity/Motivation 

I tried out various apps to boost my productivity. One that I really liked was The Rock Clock- An alarm clock launched in 2016 by Dwayne Johnson that served as an amazing pick-me-up right from the beginning of the day. I loved the stark yellow and black font and motivational messages added to the fact that it was about a man who I believe has one of the sickest work ethics in the whole world. Unfortunately, the app isn’t available anymore. However, there are many others that have taken its place. The most important App for me productivity-wise is the Productivity Challenge Timer and I’ll discuss about why this App can change everything in a later part of this article. Also, you can develop the habit of writing out your daily goals on something like Google Keep or Evernote both of which are great to help keep you organized. If you suffer from a cellphone addiction syndrome and just can’t keep yourself from obsessively checking your phone then you must try the very innovative Forest app. It might just help you break the addiction of constantly staying online.

YouTube 

Use YouTube judiciously in your prep. Although plugging my own content in this article is a bit cheeky the reason I started YouTube is to help empower aspirants with the tools they need for self study and as such you can get all the content I make for free on my channel. You can check out my channel here if you are interested. I cover Current Affairs focused Quizzes which will help you to attempt the General Awareness section with ease and I also cover Banking and Financial Awareness, English skills & many other conceptual videos on my channel. Learning Space used to be a great Channel and they had a free 30 video Banking Awarness series which helped me. But now, they have put all of it behind a paywall on their website and frankly, it isn’t worth it to pay so much for just 30 videos so I won’t even put a link to them. You can go through Mrunal Patel’s videos on Banking Awarness but leave out the rest as it will just be overkill for SBI. And of course, it goes without saying that you must subscribe to SBI’s channel. The short product summaries there are amazing. A very underrated channel is The Hindu’s BusinessLine. They make quality content and some short and crisp videos that are worth watching. You should also subscribe to RBI’s Channel, IMF’s Channel and Narendra Modi’s Channel for contemporary Government schemes and focus issues.

Websites 

I mostly frequented websites to keep track of Current Affairs and of course for attempting full length mock tests. Sometimes they also helped to discover new strategies or stay motivated. Pick any one website among BankersAdda, GKToday or AffairsCloud for daily GA updates. The Gradeup website was super helpful with a great UI for taking lots of quizzes. I liked Testbook’s blog and used to do free tests from their website sometimes. I was very poor in the GA section, the reason being that I didn’t fully comprehend how big of a part GA plays in these exams and hence did not make daily notes. For GA you MUST make daily notes even if you read from printed capsules. That writing habit everyday will help you remember the data much more effectively. The BankersAdda monthly capsules and special exam focused capsules released just before big exams were very helpful for a quick revision. Gradeup splits the Dynamic GA and Static GA into a GK Tornado and Static GK Digest respectively. Both should both be read cover to cover- covering 100% of BankersAdda and Gradeup material will be a big challenge. If you can successfully do this and remember what you read, you can definitely  expect to score in the 30-35 marks range in GA and get an incomparably huge edge in the Mains exam. As for mock tests I relied upon 3 primary sources- the paid tests from Oliveboard and Gradeup and free tests from other prep companies. Another offline source of mock tests was the BSC Chronicle magazine. You can buy the subscription for this as it offers great value at a low cost. 

The 10 Special Tips that I can give you to crack the exam

The path to success is riddled with hardship, heartbreak and heartburn. I didn’t know if what I was doing was ever going to take me to my goal. In retrospect, however, I can pinpoint which are the strategies that worked and which failed. So here are the 10 special tips that I can offer to you, crystallized from the epiphany of success.

The 1 thing they cannot change about the exam

“Change is the only constant” is an oft-repeated adage to describe the SBI PO exam. Change plays an even bigger role in Mains with newer and newer questions cropping up every other year. However, even in times of tumultuous change there is 1 part of the Mains exam they just cannot change. It’s General Awareness. This is the most important of the four pillars. It will help you directly in Mains-GA, indirectly to frame your essays in the Descriptive exam and even give you an edge in the interview phase.  Sure, GA questions have evolved over time moving from static to more dynamic. Fundamentally though, they are the same every year. You know what questions you can expect to see in the GA section. Even in 2016 when we were bombarded with a very different paper, the GA section stuck to tradition. It was the same in the following year. If there is 1 thing I wish I knew when I was starting preparation for the exam its this: The 40 marks of GA is the definitive gamechanger in Mains.

I was very weak in GA primarily because I hated having to mug up so much irrelevant data. My initial thought process was “Let me first crack Prelims and then I’ll think about GA”. Big mistake. Then, I thought like so many others do- “Oh, I’m good in Quant/Reasoning/English I’ll make up for questions I lose out on in GA”. No, you won’t. To add to my woes I didn’t see the point of writing down the data and making my own notes when it was easily available in printable form. Another big blunder. Writing down the daily news updates gives you a huge boost if you are a kinesthetic learner like me. For some people it might not be necessary but most of us remember things better if we have written them down. It’s something to do with muscle memory. The bottomline is that the importance of GA cannot possibly be overstated. It might be the one thing that helps you sail through in the end. 

Refrain from being Puzzled

I see people fretting over Reasoning section puzzles all the time. After every exam while walking out of the hall with other aspirants I would listen to them endlessly discussing the permutations and combinations they did to arrive at the solution to the tough puzzles. Some would victoriously pump their fists into the air when their answers matched with others. I remember seeing that and being puzzled(no pun intended) myself. Must you surely attempt puzzles? There are a lot of easy questions in the exam. Why not aim for the low hanging fruit first? No exam will give only puzzles. Even if the Reasoning section of Mains contains 5 puzzles its only 25 questions out of 45. Why not focus on the remaining 20 first? Get 100% accuracy in those and only after attempting them all move to puzzles and maybe do 1 with good accuracy instead of obsessing over all of them and unnecessarily increasing palpitations. I will share with you my personally tailored approach for Prelims and Mains over the next parts of this blog series.

One of the harsh lessons I learnt early on in my prep was how much difficult it could be for me to actually focus on the exam. How easily I would be distracted from the task at hand. I looked long and hard for a solution to this and found some really great free Performance Tracker Apps. These days there are so many distractions in our life that its a miracle we actually get anything done. Unless you are careful, the days and weeks and even months seem to zoom by so fast and then you feel guilty about how much time you have wasted. You must not allow this to happen. I knew I just had to change this and take stock of my time daily. After a lot of experimentation I finally found the Productivity Challenge Timer App. You might consider this an exaggeration but this app literally changed my life. I can’t tell you how many projects this app has helped me complete till now. To this day, it remains among one of those apps that I never deleted from my phone and I even bought the premium version(as of writing this its only about ₹ 150 on Android and ₹ 400 on the iOS. You don’t really have to buy this for SBI PO prep and can use the free version but if you like this app as much as I do it’ll probably be one the best investments you’d have ever made App-wise). The app allows you to designate projects and work on them using an in-built timer to log the hours you spend working on the project daily. The name you use for the project matters to subconsciously reinforce that thought into your brain. I used a simply worded message: Become SBI PO. Once a session ends you can even schedule how long of a break you want to take before coming back again. The app even whistles if you don’t come back! You must be true to yourself though. Because, if you start a work session and don’t actually work then who are you fooling but yourself?

The basic idea is to “game”ify work- various studies have shown that humans are inherently drawn to games and the app challenges you to work more and transform work into a game you play against yourself. You  slowly see yourself working more and more and as you do, you rise through the in built ranking system. Another intriguing thing is how the App talks down to you, almost commands you and sometimes insults your tenacity. It’s like having a mentor just pushing you to stop being lazy and work harder everyday. And what a taskmaster this mentor can be! If you slack off and start to work lesser hours it will demote you from your rank and slap you with a stern quote. If you’re naturally competitive, this app will help you become almost maniacally productive and driven to beat all your records. It features a statistics tab as well where you can see the progress that you made over the course of your prep. Since I began using this app and till the day of Mains I never missed a day of studying. I don’t know why, but this app somehow just clicked with me. I hope it serves you as well as it has served me. 

Its extremely fun to wonder what new achievements you could unlock next!

Here’s an interesting fact about the human mind. Our brains evolved over thousands of years to help us survive in extreme conditions and learn from our environment. That’s how our ancestors made it in life. Its a tenet that’s hard coded into our DNA. So, whatever we focus on gets bigger. Has this ever happened to you? One fine morning you read about a new movie that you hadn’t heard of before. You leave the house and are driving on the road and suddenly the radio jockey starts speaking about that very movie. You pass a street that you cross everyday and for the first time you see the posters from that same movie staring at you. They were there for two weeks but its the first time you notice them. A similar thing happened to me when I got selected in SBI. I used to have a very bad memory about locations of bank branches and now suddenly my mind was hyper alert to SBI branches! I started to notice branches everywhere I went as my mind subconsciously kept wondering about which branch they would post me in.

What changed? The external world remained the same but something in your brain started telling you: “Hey, this is important. Pay attention!”. Scientists have a fancy name for this: Frequency Illusion. It’s an illusion because all of it is happening inside you. The world didn’t change overnight. Your thought process did. Your brain did. Your brain reacts to the external stimuli your environment provides. Fill your house with positivity and motivational quotes. All the covers of my notebooks were bursting with positive quotes. I scribbled down You can do it everywhere I could. Use Post-It notes if you have them and write positive messages on them that hit you right when you wake up. Use something specific like I am destined to be an SBI PO, write those random messages while you are working. Force your brain to BELIEVE that you are already successful and in some weird, wonderful way the positive vibrations will make it come true. Your environment must be filled with things and people who reinforce the success that you believe you are destined to achieve.

 Failure was not an option, is not an option and will never be an option 

Mini Goals must essentially be:

• Measurable – For example, ‘Develop ability to complete 15 Quant problems in 30 minutes’. It must be specific & quantifiable. You must know by what amount you missed hitting that goal or exceeded it.
• Achievable –Factor in your own strengths before you set the goal. If you are weak in Quants then start with 5 or 10 problems in 30 minutes and then steadily increase it. Don’t set over the top goals.
• ‘Complete’able –Don’t have vague goals like “Get better in English”. Can you define better? Rather, have something like “Write an essay in 20 minutes”. You can definitely say you completed the goal when you hit your desired timing.
• Upgradeable –Competitive exams are all about taking yourself to the next level every day by upgrading what you can do today. Can do 15 sums in 30 minutes? Push for 20. Then 25. Then 30. See how far you can stretch yourself. It’s like playing videogames- your rank/level increases as you gain experience.

Building up big dreams is great for inspiration but breaking them down into manageable pieces is essential for execution

Once you set a mini goal that has all the 4 attributes above work on each one until completion. Then, upgrade your goal. Finish it. Repeat. Some good mini goal ideas- ‘Finish Time and Work chapter’, ‘Develop ability to complete 30 Quants in 30 minutes with >=90% accuracy’, ‘Develop ability to crack complex multi-switch Input Output in <=5 minutes’, ‘Write essay in 15 minutes’, ‘Increase mock test accuracy to >=80%’. Once you set Mini Goals like these and hit them consistently, your energy levels will shoot up and you will feel that you’ve upgraded yourself. I want you to understand something. Most people feel that success is this exciting, esoteric, grand event that needs superhuman effort and alignment of the stars to happen for them. They could not be more wrong. Success is about doing the small things. It’s about achieving the small mini goals you set for yourself everyday. And then moving onto another small goal and achieving that. It is boring and so simple that it’s borderline crazy. It’s about just completing things everyday. And before long you will see that you have developed a superhuman ability that allows you to live the life of your dreams. Start small. Achieve big.

This tip also deals with the ambit of your online activity in addition to how you should watch YouTube. I want you to do an activity right now. Log into your Google account and check your YouTube history. Go to your playlist history and check out the last 20 videos you watched. How many of them were self-improvement videos? How many of them were videos that help you achieve your goal? And how many are purely entertainment videos? You will be struck with how much of useless garbage most people fill their brains with. Just open YouTube in incognito mode and you’ll see India’s trending page filled with trashy songs, trailers, TV soaps and politics. The problem is so bad, I was forced to make a small video on this aspect on my channel! Here is a tool that allows a person to tap into the reservoir of universal knowledge and this is how the vast majority use it. Don’t be like them. Develop a habit to close any videos which will not serve you. Keep away from that junk. Secondly, allocate time to watching YouTube (you can use an alarm or Google Timer) and don’t exceed it. If you are still addicted then do this- open the YT app and go to “Time watched”, there you can click on the option “Remind me to take a break” and YouTube itself will remind you if you are watching too much YouTube! Isn’t that a nifty trick to stop bingeing!

A detailed breakdown like this helps you visually find your consistently weak areas

A word of warning though: Remember that when you are taking mocks you are applying what you learnt and not learning anything new. So, if you only take mocks your existing skills will be pruned and perfected but you won’t learn new skills. You will soon reach a state where your scores will flatline and your performance would seem like it’s hit a Plateau. Don’t fall into that trap. After you have gained an understanding of the basics, do mocks on every alternative day and in between the mock test days spend time to find new tips and tricks to boost your scores even further. You must always give your brain new information to process and get stronger and better. Analysis of mocks is super important. But you must also set aside time to actually work upon the analysis and not keep doing mock after mock after mock. Do the mock, Write down your scores, Finish your Review, Work upon the weak areas for a day and only then repeat the process and you will see a continually upward trend in your scores.

There is a lot of evil in this world. News stories that are doing the rounds in the nation today would horrify any decent human. I know that it feels painful when we read about these things. You are frustrated. I know. Even I am. I know some of you try to channelize this pent up anger by writing about it, signing petitions on Change.org and trying to somehow compel our politicians, who walk about with a makeshift halo on their head, to even address these gruesome things. The youth of this country today is awake to all the issues that plague our country. But my friend, if you are an aspirant for any exam then I must ask you to stop. You need to let it go. Because there is nothing actionable that you can work upon right now to change things. Today in our country there is an abundance of people with an opinion but a severe shortage of people with an action plan. Writing your feelings on Facebook or Tweeting about it will not make the problem go away. There is so much ignorance in the grassroots level.  Do you really want to change something? Read on.

Today in our country there is an abundance of people with an opinion but a severe shortage of people with an action plan

First, work on your own life. No one will listen to you today even in your own locality as they do not believe your opinion to have the value to change their perceptions. You might have a golden idea that can change so much. Yet, Society is superficial. It values things not based on merit but on perceived importance. Achieve your dreams and get into the position that you desire. Once you do that you will see firsthand how society will start to respect you. After I got into SBI, the locality uncles who I never even knew about came up and started to chat, started to shake my hand and congratulate me. I realized something then. Society only values the opinions of those who, in their mind, have achieved something of great consequence. Once you get to that point you can take up the mantle of change. You can become an influencer in your community and start to direct the community towards your vision of a better India. Until that time comes, work upon yourself in silence. Remove the noise from your life. Stop going out with friends. Ruthlessly cut out anything from your life that is holding you back from achieving what you want. Before you change your nation you must first change yourself. Change, does indeed, start with you. You have a responsibility to live the best life you can, so that you can become a beacon and help others in our vast country who are not as fortunate as you have been.

 Hindsight is 20/20. When I was an apirant even I was needlessly worried about Puzzles. And see what I’m preaching now!

As you write more and more about your feelings and experiences after every exam you gain an insight into what goes on in your head during exams. What is your mind thinking? What is it that you are weak in? What rattles your nerves and makes you super anxious? Write out whatever post exam thought pops into your mind. Alongwith the exam experience write about who you met, what you ate before the exam, about the environment, about anything at all that you can remember about the whole exam. Write questions or parts of questions that you remember. Pour your heart out. After a few days analyze these and you will understand how your mind works. Before the next exam be sure to review these written down notes and you will see that the next exam will be starkly different- as you keep doing this you will soon become an elite aspirant. Ready for any challenge. Over the course of the next parts of this blog series I will take a deep dive into my own debriefs after every exam.

The KSA isn’t purely a theoretical concept. It can help you pick the right questions in the exam. First, you need to have a clear understanding of your personal KSAs. Take a lot of mocks to understand where your natural Skills lie- if you have done it in mocks then you can definitely repeat it in the actual exam. How do you apply KSAs? Consider a situation where you are attempting the Reasoning section and you are faced with a Puzzle. Now, you know that you don’t have a Skill of doing hard puzzles even though you have the Knowledge of doing it. You have two choices- attempt it and invest 5 to 7 minutes at the end of which you can either gain 5 marks or lose out on those minutes. So, if you have questions remaining in the Reasoning section that you do have both the Skill and Knowledge to do, then you probably invest those 5 minutes in those questions for a better return.

Sometimes you feel like you can do a problem in Quant that you haven’t seen before in your mocks. It’s just that feeling in the back of your mind where your ego is telling you that you have the Ability to do it. But if your KSAs are ingrained in your psyche then then you will know that you might have the Ability to do it but you haven’t repeated it earlier and hence do not have the Skill to get it done. That will help you stay away. The exam is not about how much Knowledge you have. It is about how you leverage your Abilities to hone your Skills

Never forget who you are and it can never be used against you

Peer pressure is a really weird thing. It can force you to believe something about yourself to be true even when your conscience knows it to be false. You might be ashamed of being bad in something and want to work harder and then make wrong calls to prove something in the exam. Don’t. It’s OK to be bad at Quant. It’s OK to be weak in English. It’s OK to be poor in GA. Sometimes, you can’t change that about yourself but don’t make this only about getting better in those subjects. The end goal is to crack an exam and not show off your prowess in a particular subject. You don’t need to be a genius to do it. I have seen so many people, vastly more capable than me who failed to crack the exam. Just because they let the peer pressure get to them and made it about proving someone wrong. Let them laugh. Be true to yourself. You are beautiful just as you are. Remember Tyrion Lannister’s words and “Wear it like armor, and it can never be used to hurt you”. 

I can’t believe the amount of excuses people come up with to not exercise. “I’m too busy”, “I can’t afford to waste 30 minutes on a walk!”, “I’m too lazy to wake up early”. Although it might sound counter intuitive but spending your energy on a good walk in the morning can actually make you feel much more energetic during the day. Infact, I found that a 30 to 40 minute walk in the morning would boost my energy levels so much that I could get done three hours worth of work in just one hour. The initial days it will be tough to push yourself out of bed but do it for ten days and you won’t be able to stop. Once you hit that momentum, you’ll wake up even before the alarm clock rings. There’s another benefit- You know that feeling when you wake up and feel so drowsy that you want to get back to sleep? That’s your body’s clock telling you its confused. As you start exercising in the morning you will experience less days of waking up in a low energy state. Exercise in the morning has a way of resetting your body’s circadian rhythm. As time passes, your body starts to prime itself for the exercise in the morning and you get a huge boost of energy in the morning when you wake up. And you’re ready to own the day right from the start.

I used to walk everyday during my prep. Early in the morning I would fire up Runkeeper and go out to walk in a nearby park. It was just me, by myself with my music in nature. Go with a friend if you’d like but don’t talk. Just listen to positive music(please refrain from Bollywood’s traditional unrequited love songs) and get your workout. 4 to 5 kms daily was enough for me. You will see and feel the difference in your body literally within weeks. Hilariously enough, people start to ask you whether you are sick when you start to go for a walk everyday! See the point our society has come to- when people feel that someone needs to be sick before they start taking care of their own body. I know so many aspirants who have their nose buried in their notes right from when they wake up in the morning. Don’t be like that. Your brain is not designed for prolonged concentration. Work for a few hours and take a walk. Do something to relax. And then come back reinvigorated. Take care of your posture- study at a table if possible and not on your bed. And keep up the morning routine workout. The motive behind this is to get your blood flowing which will, in turn, activate the neurons in your brain. You might have a knack for sports- feel free to indulge in that as long as it doesn’t eat up too much of your day. I chose walking because it’s something you can do daily and unlike running, there is less chance of injury here. Get up and get moving. Life isn’t about sitting still.

A word on Cognitive Endurance

This exam will test the limits of your mental capacity. There’s no doubt about that. Cognitive endurance is the amount of time that you can use your brain at full capacity before it wears out and needs rest to recoup its ability. After you exceed this limit you will make wrong decisions, judgemental errors and increase the probability of making mistakes. Everyone has a breaking point. And its measurable. Your task is to figure out how long your brain can remain active and operate at full efficiency before mental fatigue creeps in and you start tripping even on elementary problems. The only way to do this is to slowly increase the length of your work sessions.

In prelims, its mostly about speed and acceleration ability. Prelims is a Sprint, so endurance won’t play much of a role here. Mains, however, is a marathon. You have 3 hours to complete the objective paper followed by a descriptive test of 30 minutes for a total of 3.5 hours. Remember that there is no way to skip a section so you must sit for the whole time in front of a computer. There is no breathing room between sections and there are no breaks allowed. Your eyes burn as you squint to find the exact data points on some complicated bar graph. All the while your brain is trying to process difficult problems and crunch a huge amount of data and arrive at the solutions with flawless accuracy. God, what a toll it takes! The first time I sat for a mock test I was totally drained and had to take a break before analyzing my answers. But as I did more mocks I slowly got the hang of it. Some mocks won’t provide a descriptive test so you can simulate one yourself and sit for the whole 3.5 hours. And you must sit at a desk and use a PC(avoid a Laptop if you can) for the full experience. Towards the last phase when Mains was knocking at the door I could comfortably sit for the whole session and even start analyzing my mocks right away.

Building your cognitive endurance will take time. It doesn’t happen overnight. Once you have found a good rhythm in your prep I urge you to push the limits and sit for long stretches of time. Push your brain to do just 1 more question when it is screaming to rest. Our brains are remarkably elastic and so is our body. You’ll find that your eyes will adapt to the screen, provided you increase the sessions incrementally and not in 1 shot. Be patient with yourself. And in time, your brain will become a force to reckon with.

Remember what JFK said

Visionary American President John F. Kennedy, in his now iconic Moon mission speech remarked “We choose to do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard”. You know what’s easy? Going out today and watching The Avengers in theatres and endlessly wasting time discussing it. What’s much harder is to stay focused and work. To postpone your plans with your friends just so you can work on your dreams. To work harder each day even when the results just seem to take forever to come. It would be easy for an SBI PO to work his daily job and come back home, kick back and relax. It’s harder to spend sleepless nights trying to write out a highly detailed strategy in the hopes that it will help somebody out there who is struggling. Will you do the easy things or the hard ones? As I remarked earlier in the article, the time for action is at your doorstep. The choice is yours to make.

Question everything.

If you have read the whole article till this point, kudos to you. You have just finished reading an article that is almost 10,000 words long (yup, couldn’t believe it myself!). You are already way ahead of most. 90% of your competition won’t bother to read this article from start to finish. I told you about everything that I used on my road not because I want you to follow me. You see, you are unique. You have your own way of approaching problems and finding solutions. Your takeaway from this article will be different than somebody else’s. Your task is to find out how to use what you learnt here and apply that to your situation to improve yourself. No strategy is foolproof. Nor is any strategy ideal. There is an old saying “Success has many fathers, Failure is an orphan”. Failure will teach you what success never will. Never forget that. Yes, you have seen some tough times. But there is only one way from the deepest pits of hell and that’s upwards. Beat on your craft everyday. The payoffs from hard work may not be immediately obvious. But, the payoff surely will come. In the end, it always does. Subscribe to Supriyo Panda’s Newsletter!