The Importance of the Big Picture and the question WHY

As you move onto 3rd year and beyond, you’ll encounter a lot of profs telling you to always look at the bigger picture. Quite simply, a lot of people don’t realize the power of this – to see everything from a bird’s eye view. In business schools everywhere, profs always ask their students what the “bottom line” is after a detailed discussion of some idea or concept. And a lot of times, most of the class sits there flabbergasted in silence without an answer. You have the few who see the big picture right away and as a result summarize all the details into one clear statement that everyone can understand as soon as they hear it. I’m sure all of you have experienced this before sitting in your classes whether they be business or science courses. At that very moment, you realize the power of reducing everything down to its most core and basic principle – a straightforward rule that anyone can grasp. And this is what sets those who score 90%+ in courses as opposed to everyone else. Anyone can study hard and get themselves all prepped up for their exam, but few can elevate their understanding beyond the superficial memorization and understanding of doing problems.

Seeing the big picture also goes hand-in-hand with knowing WHY something is. And I don’t just mean understanding WHY the concept is the way it is or why you do that problem like that. I mean WHY the hell are you learning this in the first place in this course. These are two very different things. To put it in perspective for all of you, let’s take an example to show you what I mean. BIOL 201. Why are there that many extra ATP made going through the TCA cycle? Next question you should ask: Why are we even bother learning the TCA cycle? I always constantly ask myself this question when I’m studying. WHY, WHY, WHY am I learning this? To give you some urgency on this matter, most of us only have about 21,170 days to live (if average life expectancy is 80 and most of us are in our early 20s). Life is precious and finite. If we are using up our life to learn something, it better be for a good reason and I better know why exactly I’m learning this stuff. As normal human beings, we’re always asking why to our friend’s facebook status says “John is feeling sad” or why to buying something when we’re making a purchase with our own money. But as students, we have been so accustomed to rote learning and exam mentality that has killed our interest in learning and always asking WHY we have to learn this. The A+ student always realizes the PURPOSE of learning something. Once you have reduced everything down to its core idea and knows its purpose, you can quite easily create a mental map of the entire course in your head and connect all the dots.