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I noticed the most successful people, in the sense of advancing their career and publishing papers, I meet at work have a certain belief in themselves. What is striking, no matter their age/career stage, it is like they are already taking certain their success and where to go in the future.
I also noticed this is something that people from non-working class backgrounds manage to do.
Second point. They are good at finishing projects and delivering results in time.
I noticed that this was somehow independent from how smart is someone.
While I am very good at single tasks, I have always struggled with long term academic performance. I know it is true for some other people too.
What kind of knowledge/mentality am I missing? Because I feel stuck.
Okay, so I would say that I atleast have some experience of going from being not that agentic to being more agentic and the stuff that I think worked the best for me was to generally think of my life as a system. This has been the focus of my life over the last 3 years.
More specifically the process that has helped so far for me has been to:
Think of yourself as a system and optimise the shit out of it. Weirdly enough, this has made me focus a lot more on self-care than I did before.
Of course, it's a work in progress but I want to say that it is possible and that you can do it.
Also, randomly, here's a CIV VI analogy for you on why self-care is op.
If you want to be great at CIV, one of the main things to do is to increase your production and economics as fast as possible. This leads to an exponential curve where the more production and economy you have the more you can produce. This is why CIV pros in general rush Commercial Hubs and markets as internal trade routes yield more production.
Your production is based on your psychological well being and the general energy levels that you have. If you do a bunch of tests on this and figure out what works for you, then you have even more production stats. This leads to more and more of that over time until you plateau at the end of that logistic growth.
Best of luck!
Long term performance is a result of many skills / memes working together. I suspect you may have noticed that the children of white collar workers are more prepared for white collar work. It would make sense that they have inherited a set of memes that help with white collar work.
Academic performance isn't the only thing, consider your fail conditions. There's lots of things out there to be good at.
If you'd still like to keep going, I would say just keep practicing, I reckon it's taken me about four years to get good at my job. Look at what works and what doesn't for you.
I found that tracking my time helped with focusing on one thing at a time, having a prioritized to do list helped me focus on the right thing, having a study group helped make learning fun, easy and consistent. Trying to fit all the knowledge I needed for a class on a single a4 sheet helped me memorize what I needed (something about the refining process).
Otherwise get good sleep, lay off the substances, get some exercise in the sun and time with friends and family and you will be right as rain.
Oh and do at least three past exams for each class. Best to practice in the conditions you will be performing in.
Is this selection bias? I have had people who are overconfident and get nowhere.
I don't think it's independent from smartness, a smart+conscientious person is likely to do better.
I’m not quite sure how to answer your question, but at least I have similar feelings: that my conscientiousness is relatively low ; and that many people who do cooler stuff than me appear to be more driven, with clearer goals and a better ability to actually go and pursue them. I have various thoughts on this: