Time Spent Doing the Things I/We Don't Enjoy

It's that time of the year when the final exams are on and I am all concerned with acing the tests (which to me is getting more than or equal to a 70% overall). I devote like 10 hours a day to studying exactly two months before the exams begin. Of course to the ultra nerdy, and often ultra introverted, students, 10 hours of digging into their books wouldn't seem a big deal, but for someone like me, who detests the whole education system (not learning, mind you), it is a big deal, and it feels like drinking milk (which I utterly detest in it's plain liquid form).

While studying the ultra boring, yet simple, subject of Psychology at Work (Psychology majors would disagree to it being boring but then it's my opinion and it's my blog), my concentration began to fade two minutes into beginning to reading the first page, and soon I was thinking about something else: the time we spend doing the things we don't quite enjoy.

I remember hearing “A man's got to do what a man's got to do,” from some movie and then I knew what the guy meant. “A man's got to do what a man's got to do” in no way is the same thing as “A man's got to do what a man wants to do.” And therein struck realization.

We all do (yes, I am generalizing) quite a few things that we don't like or enjoy. We do them because they have to be done. For e.g., I have to dig into what seems to be countless textbooks, with a white back ground and black fonts, just to get a pass certificate required by employers to show off my worth (although I must say, when you laminate the certificate, it does look pretty decent filed up).

We (again, I'm generalizing) want to do so much, but in order to do it, we do things that we not necessarily want to do. For e.g., I want to be a business man, but for that I must do two things: study (often study subjects I don't want to just because there's no sufficient option) and work under someone (in order to gain some experience). Of course you could skip studying traditionally and just do it on your own, read a few books and call your self “smart” but then getting a business loan, with your credentials being almost zero, is not going to easily happen. Also, you could just jump into a business without zero experience and learn from that, but then that's more like running your marathon with no real practice.
Mostly, I guess, we do those things we don't quite enjoy because in most cases we feel it contributes to forming a big picture. These little things (which sometimes take forever to do) seem like small pieces of a puzzle, a puzzle when completed will, or at least is expected to, delight us. Or in some cases, we just don't realize the alternatives, or do not have the guts to do what we do like doing, settling for something else instead, and this is disappointing.

So, again... what this post is all about, is just me simply wondering to myself, how much time of my life am I going to do things that I don't quite like and why.
If we (yes, once again generalizing) ponder long enough, we can generate a long list of things we would do instead of doing the things we do do (which is very true in my case), but then it's not necessarily a bad thing. From the way I see it, I feel it's alright to keep doing something you don't quite like, if and only if, it contributes to the big picture. For example, studying hard Psychology at work (you can't be blamed for assuming I can't think of other examples) because it's an easy subject and will help me push my grades up, which in turn will give me a good educational backing. However, doing what you don't like just because you're ignorant to the alternatives, that's pitiful.