Indonesian Version

Sometimes the first sign of distance is a story someone decides to keep to themselves.

A few weeks ago, they might have told us what happened on the way home. Today, they think about it for a moment and let it pass. We may be sitting right beside them and have no idea anything has changed.

There may be no argument either of us can point to. One person may feel they’ve been doing their best to stay close. The other may feel they’ve been trying alone. Both can be telling the truth about how it feels from where they sit.

I wonder how often we mistake the familiar rhythm of a relationship for a sign that all is well. We know when the other person comes home, what they like for dinner, and how they take their coffee. How recently have we heard what’s been weighing on them?

The small ways we reach for each other

The relationship researcher John Gottman calls these small attempts to connect bids for connection. They can be as ordinary as a question about the day, a joke shared across the room, or a quiet “Can I tell you something?”

Gottman describes three ways we can respond. We can turn toward the invitation and give it our attention, turn away and let it pass, or turn against it with irritation or dismissal.

“Something interesting happened today,” someone says.

“Oh, really?” we reply, our eyes still on the phone.

The moment is easy to miss. The person may simply finish their sentence and move on. When enough moments end this way, though, they may begin to wonder whether the things they want to share still matter to us.

There will be evenings when we’re too tired to listen well. “I’d like to hear about it. Can we talk after dinner?” can be an honest answer. What happens after dinner matters, too. When we come back and ask about the story, we show that we remembered someone wanted to share it with us.

When silence starts to feel easier

Someone can still tell us about their day and quietly give up on telling us how they feel.

Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety offers a way to think about this. She studied teams and found that people were more willing to ask questions, acknowledge mistakes, and raise concerns when they felt safe taking those interpersonal risks. Her work was in organizations, and it leaves me with a question about the people closest to us. What have they come to expect from us when they say something difficult?

A partner may hold back a disappointment because the last time they brought one up, the conversation quickly turned into a defense of what we meant. A child may rehearse how to tell us about a mistake, already imagining our reaction. A friend may decide to let a hurt go unmentioned because they value the friendship and worry what will happen if they speak.

Silence can make an evening easier for everyone. Over time, it can also leave us with very little idea of how the other person is doing. When someone trusts us enough to tell us what’s been hard, can we give them time to finish, even when we remember the moment differently?

Making room for what we didn’t see

It can be painful to hear that someone felt alone at a time when we thought we were doing our best to care for them. Our first impulse may be to explain. Perhaps we were exhausted. Perhaps we thought giving them space was what they wanted. These things may be true, and there is still more to hear about what it was like for them.

“I think there’s something I missed. Can you tell me what that was like for you?”

The hardest part of asking may be staying with the answer. We may hear about an evening we barely remember, or a remark we thought was harmless. It takes humility to let another person’s memory of a moment add something to our own.

That can change what we do the next time. We might put the phone down when they begin to speak, ask a question before drawing a conclusion, or apologize and give them room to respond before explaining ourselves. Small gestures carry more weight when they answer something the other person has actually been asking for.

Letting trust return at its own pace

A good conversation can leave us hopeful. The person who has spent months deciding what to keep to themselves may need time before sharing feels natural again. They may start with something small and see how it goes.

We can give them time. Perhaps they tell us a little more the next week because we listened this time. Perhaps they bring up something harder a month later because we’ve shown that we can disagree and still treat them with care. Those ordinary encounters give them something to draw on when they wonder whether it’s safe to open up again.

Repair takes a willingness on both sides, and each person gets to decide how close they’re ready to be. Where there is violence, manipulation, or repeated disregard for someone’s boundaries, safety and dignity come first. Keeping one’s distance can be a way of caring for oneself.

Staying curious about someone we’ve known for years

When things feel easier again, it’s tempting to assume we understand each other. We go back to our routines. The questions that made space for an honest conversation get asked less often.

But the person we’ve known for years may be carrying something we’ve never asked about. What once reassured them may feel different now. A responsibility they took on gladly may have grown heavy. Even the way they want us to be there for them can change.

There is something tender about staying curious after years together. We can know someone’s stories by heart and still make room for the one they’re living through now. We can disagree about what happened and care about how it felt for them. Some of the most revealing conversations begin on an ordinary evening, when there’s time to ask a question and stay long enough to hear the answer.

I wonder who in my life I’ve grown so used to seeing that I’ve stopped asking how they are. Perhaps the next time they say, “Something happened today,” I’ll put down what I’m doing and ask them to tell me about it.

There may be a whole part of their day, or of their life, I’ve yet to hear.

When a Relationship Begins to Drift, What Do We Really Need? was originally published in Thoughts & Reflections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I met Michael in a Boston subway station.

I told him I liked his sign.

“What matters is what it means to you,” he told me.

I asked what it meant to him.

“Doing a deed or expressing kindness to another person without expecting anything in return,” Michael said.

I love striking up conversations with strangers wherever I go. The more I listen, the more I realize how much we have in common.

Michael’s answer made me think about how quickly we question someone’s motives when they do something kind.

“Oh, they must want something.”

“There’s no way they’re sincere.”

“Just wait. You’ll see what’s in it for them.”

Sometimes the more someone gives, the more we wonder what they stand to gain.

Can an act of kindness still be kind if the person doing it has something to gain?

I found the question harder to answer than I’d expected.

If someone builds a school partly to improve their company’s image, does the school do any less good for its students?

If a doctor treats patients for free and gains recognition along the way, does that diminish what the care means to those patients?

If a lawyer helps people who can’t afford legal representation and becomes better known for it, does that make the help any less valuable to the people they represent?

Our motives are rarely simple. We may feel empathy, take satisfaction in helping, want to be appreciated, or act out of faith. We may also have something to gain.

I’ve come to think of these motives as falling along a spectrum. More than one can be at work in a single act, though one may be stronger than the others.

At one end, we do the right thing because we’re afraid of being punished or judged.

A little further along, we hope for something in return. It might be praise, a better reputation, or some other reward.

Then there are times when someone else’s suffering moves us. We begin to care more about what they need than about what we might gain.

Further along, we do what we believe is right, even when no one is watching.

While reading Todd E. Outcalt’s Seven Deadly Virtues, I found myself reflecting on another place kindness can come from.

It can grow out of gratitude to the Creator, from the realization that the goodness we share has its source in the One who lets it reach others through us.

That thought stayed with me.

When praise is what keeps us giving, we may stop when the applause dies down. When we give for what we stand to gain, we may stop when the reward disappears.

But when kindness grows out of gratitude, it can endure as circumstances change.

It becomes a way of life.

When we recognize how much love we’ve received, how many doors have opened for us, and how often someone has helped us along the way, sharing that kindness begins to feel natural. It’s an expression of gratitude for what we’ve received.

A tree bears fruit because that’s what a tree does. I wonder if kindness can become that natural to us, too.

In the end, I doubt we can ever fully know what’s in another person’s heart. We can see what they do and feel the good it brings. The Creator alone knows what moves them deep down.

So where do I find myself on that spectrum?

Am I acting out of fear?

Do I want to be praised?

Am I moved by someone else’s need?

Do I believe it’s the right thing to do?

Or does it come from a heart full of gratitude to the Creator?

An act of kindness can still do good even when our motives are mixed. When I ask myself what might keep me giving even when no one notices, I come back to gratitude.

If kindness is one way we say thank you to the Creator, it can be enough to give quietly.

We know whom we’re thanking.

When Kindness Is Questioned, Is It Still Kindness? was originally published in Thoughts & Reflections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If, ten years from now, people rarely ask whether a piece was written with the help of AI, what should I still ask myself before I write?

That question came to me as I revisited something I once wrote on social media. Sometimes we hold on so tightly to what once worked that we forget why we chose it in the first place.

I used three examples from the business world.

Volkswagen raises a question about the WHAT.

When we have the ability to build something, does what we build still serve the purpose we started with?

Walmart made me think about the HOW. Low prices were a way to serve customers. What happens when keeping prices low becomes an end in itself?

Kodak and Nokia raise a different question.

What happens when the WHY still matters, but the old HOW and WHAT no longer serve it?

People still want to preserve memories and stay in touch. The products and methods that once met those needs can lose their relevance.

If you’d like to explore these examples further, I discuss them in “The Most Dangerous Kind of Loyalty,” published in Write A Catalyst on Medium.

Reading through that summary again, I thought about my own habits. When I open a blank page, I usually start looking for the first sentence. There’s a question worth asking before that.

What makes me want to write this, and why do I want to share it?

When it gets easier to put words on the page

Sometimes I write because an experience is still on my mind. Other times I want to put a question out there, wondering if someone else has wrestled with it too. Then a reader responds with a story of their own, and I find myself seeing my experience a little differently.

Volkswagen made me think about what I publish.

All I want at first is to tell the story of that first quiet Monday after retirement, when nobody expects me at the office anymore.

I hope someone going through the same thing might feel a little less alone.

If I keep adding ideas until the piece becomes a guide to building a second career, I’m writing for a different need.

I can go back to that Monday morning and let the story stay simple.

Walmart made me think about how easily a writing habit can become an end in itself.

I want the reflection to be easy to read, so I try to bring it down to three hundred words.

In chasing that number, I might cut the moment when a retiree picks up the phone, then puts it down because they can’t think of anyone to call.

That might be the very moment when a reader feels understood.

Kodak and Nokia made me wonder whether writing itself might give way to other forms in some situations.

I still want people to feel less alone as they adjust to retirement.

But suppose the people I hope to reach rarely sit down to read a long essay and are more likely to listen to a conversation or watch a short video.

I could sit down with someone who remembers those first quiet weeks and let them tell the story in their own voice (HOW).

What I share might be a short video interview or an audio conversation (WHAT).

A pause before they answer, or the way they laugh at a small memory, might reach someone who would have scrolled past my essay.

The reason for sharing the story (WHY) stays the same.

Ten years from now

I can already see hints of that future. At national seminars I’ve attended, I’ve often seen infographics made with AI. I’ve come across them in articles on different platforms, too.

As far as I could tell, the people in those rooms rarely minded how an infographic was made when the speaker could explain the idea clearly and show why it mattered to them.

That helped me see where AI fits. An infographic can make it easier for an audience to see how ideas relate.

The speaker still needs to understand what’s on the screen and explain it in their own words.

I think much the same is true when I write. I bring the experience, questions, and ideas I want to share.

I tell AI where I want the piece to go, who I’m writing for, and which details matter.

AI can help me organize the material or refine a sentence. As we go, I can weigh its suggestions, correct a reading that feels off, or steer the draft back toward what I meant.

Ten years from now, writing with AI may feel as ordinary as seeing those infographics at a seminar.

Readers may rarely ask how a piece was made.

I still want to ask myself, What do I really want to say, why does it matter, and who am I trying to reach?

Those questions give me a direction before the first sentence takes shape.

AI can help me test an idea or see a possibility I hadn’t considered.

I get to decide whether a suggestion brings me back to that quiet Monday morning, whether the scene with the phone is worth keeping, or whether the story would reach someone more readily if they heard it in the voice of the person who lived it.

I imagine a reader finishing a piece and remembering something they’ve kept to themselves for a long time.

Then they write back.

“Something like that happened to me, too. I think I’m ready to tell someone about it.”

If that happens, I hope I’ll make time to read their story.

More to explore

• The Wrong Question in the Age of AI
• Who Is Thinking When We Write?
• Reading the Pattern, Not Predicting the Outcome

When Writing Gets Easier, Why Do We Still Write? was originally published in Thoughts & Reflections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Do we really understand what we claim to know, or have we simply become better at repeating what we hear?

It is a question worth asking at a time when information has become so accessible that almost everyone can participate in conversations about subjects they may have spent very little time studying.

We follow international developments, we listen to political commentators, read economic forecasts, and discuss scientific discoveries. Within minutes, we can find an explanation for almost anything. We can even present an argument using terminology that makes us sound remarkably familiar with a subject.

But familiarity is not necessarily understanding.

I find this distinction increasingly important because we seem to have developed a culture in which being informed is often treated as evidence of being knowledgeable. The more information we consume, the more confident we may become in our ability to interpret the world around us.

Yet understanding requires something that access to information cannot provide on its own. It requires the ability to examine what we hear, recognize what may be missing, and think beyond the explanation placed in front of us.

And that is where the real challenge begins.

When Familiarity Feels Like Knowledge

Think about how often we hear the same arguments repeated across television, social media, podcasts, and everyday conversations.

After a while, certain subjects begin to feel familiar. We recognize the names, understand the commonly used expressions, and know which arguments are associated with which positions.

That familiarity can be reassuring. It gives us confidence when discussing issues that might otherwise seem complicated.

But how much of that confidence comes from genuine understanding?

In 2002, psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil published research examining what they called the illusion of explanatory depth. They found that people frequently overestimate how well they understand ordinary mechanisms and processes until they are asked to explain them in detail.

What interested me about this research is how easily the underlying idea can be recognized in public discussions today.

We may believe we understand an economic crisis because we have followed the news surrounding it. We may feel knowledgeable about an international conflict because we recognize its political actors and have heard the arguments made by different sides.

But recognizing the discussion is not the same as understanding the circumstances that produced it.

The real test comes when we try to explain an issue without relying entirely on someone else’s explanation.

Can we identify the causes? Can we distinguish established facts from interpretation? Can we explain why reasonable people might reach different conclusions from the same information?

If we cannot, maybe our understanding is not as developed as our confidence suggests.

The Pressure to Have an Opinion

There is another aspect of modern communication that deserves attention.

We seem increasingly uncomfortable with not having an immediate opinion.

When something significant happens, whether it is a political development, an international crisis, or a controversial scientific announcement, public discussion begins almost instantly.

People are expected to react, agree, disagree, or choose a position right a way

The opportunity to understand often comes later, if it comes at all.

I do not believe the problem is that people express opinions. Public debate depends on the freedom to question, criticize, and disagree.

The problem begins when the pressure to have an opinion becomes stronger than the willingness to understand the issue.

Consider international affairs. A conflict may involve decades of political decisions, historical grievances, security concerns, and competing national interests. Yet much of the public discussion can quickly become a contest between simplified explanations.

One side presents its interpretation. Another side presents a competing narrative. Audiences often gravitate toward the version that aligns most closely with what they already believe.

The question of whether either explanation captures the full situation can become secondary.

This does not mean every perspective is equally valid or that facts are simply a matter of opinion. Evidence matters, and some conclusions are far better supported than others.

But understanding requires examining the evidence rather than accepting an explanation simply because it is familiar or emotionally convincing.

There is a difference between defending a position and understanding why we hold it.

Have We Become Too Comfortable With Borrowed Thinking?

No one can independently investigate every subject.

We need researchers, journalists, educators, scientists, and experienced professionals. Much of what we know comes from the work of others, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that.

The difficulty arises when we stop distinguishing between learning from someone and allowing that person to do all the thinking for us.

A respected commentator offers an interpretation, and we adopt it. An expert reaches a conclusion, and we repeat it. A particular explanation becomes popular, and eventually it begins to sound like an established fact.

Sometimes those conclusions are correct. Sometimes they are incomplete. Sometimes they are misleading.

The important question is whether we have made any effort to understand the reasoning behind them.

A 2015 study by Matthew Fisher, Mariel Goddu, and Frank Keil found that searching the internet for explanations could lead people to overestimate their own knowledge. The ability to find information created a sense of understanding that was not always supported by what individuals could explain independently.

I think this finding deserves attention beyond the context of internet searches.

Today, we can access sophisticated explanations with very little effort. Technology can summarize lengthy reports, compare competing arguments, and present complex subjects in language that appears clear and authoritative.

These capabilities are valuable. They make information accessible to people who might otherwise struggle to find or interpret it.

But they also raise an uncomfortable possibility.

Are we developing our understanding, or are we becoming increasingly skilled at presenting information that someone else has already organized for us?

There is a difference between using an explanation to support our thinking and allowing it to replace our thinking.

That difference may not always be visible in conversation, but it becomes much more important when decisions have to be made.

Understanding Takes Time, and We Do Not Always Give It Time

Some issues cannot be understood through a headline, a short video, or even a well written article.

They require background knowledge, comparison, reflection, and sometimes the willingness to reconsider an opinion we have held for years.

That process is not particularly fast.

It may involve reading arguments we disagree with, recognizing weaknesses in our own reasoning, or accepting that a situation is more complicated than we initially believed.

These are not always comfortable experiences.

It is easier to remain within explanations that reinforce what we already think. It is also easier to communicate certainty than to explain why a conclusion requires qualification.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s work on human judgment helps explain some of these tendencies. His research, including his collaboration with Amos Tversky, examined how people use mental shortcuts to make decisions and how those shortcuts can sometimes lead to predictable errors.

We depend on these shortcuts because it would be impossible to analyze every decision from the beginning.

But the fact that our minds naturally seek efficient ways of processing information should make us more aware of how easily we can reach conclusions without examining them carefully.

I sometimes wonder whether our greatest difficulty today is not the lack of available information, but our growing impatience with the process of understanding it.

We want answers quickly. We want explanations that make sense immediately. And we often prefer a clear conclusion to an honest acknowledgment that the evidence remains incomplete.

Yet intellectual maturity should include the ability to say, “I need to understand this better before I form an opinion.”

That is not a weakness.

It is a recognition that serious questions deserve serious consideration.

Why This Matters in Leadership and Public Life

The distinction between information and understanding becomes especially important when the consequences of a decision extend beyond the person making it.

Consider a business executive reviewing performance reports. The numbers may be accurate, the analysis may be detailed, and the recommendations may appear reasonable.

But do those reports explain what is actually happening within the organization?

Do they capture employee concerns, changes in customer behavior, or conditions that are difficult to measure?

A leader who relies entirely on the information presented may make a technically informed decision without fully understanding the situation.

The same concern applies to public policy.

Government officials may have access to extensive research, intelligence assessments, and expert recommendations. Yet information alone cannot determine how competing priorities should be evaluated or which consequences deserve the greatest attention.

Those decisions require judgment.

And judgment it does not depends only on what we know, but on how well we understand the limitations of what we know.

This is also where artificial intelligence enters the conversation.

AI can help us process information more efficiently than ever before. It can identify patterns, summarize research, and make complicated material easier to navigate.

But a well organized explanation should not automatically be mistaken for a complete or reliable one.

The responsibility to question assumptions, evaluate evidence, and recognize what may be missing remains with the person making the decision.

Technology can improve our access to information. It cannot relieve us of responsibility for how we use it.

Knowing the Limits of Our Understanding

One of the more interesting things about genuine expertise is that it often brings a greater awareness of complexity.

People who have spent years studying a subject may be more cautious in their conclusions because they recognize exceptions, competing interpretations, and questions that remain unresolved.

Meanwhile, someone encountering the same subject for the first time may see it as surprisingly straightforward.

This does not mean experts are always correct or that complicated explanations are necessarily better.

It means that deeper understanding often reveals details that are not immediately visible.

There is also an important distinction between uncertainty caused by insufficient knowledge and uncertainty that exists because the evidence itself is incomplete.

The first requires further learning. The second requires the judgment to recognize what can and cannot reasonably be concluded.

Neither should be confused with an inability to think independently.

In fact, I would argue that one of the clearest signs of intellectual independence is the willingness to revise a position when stronger evidence becomes available.

We do not demonstrate understanding by defending every opinion we have ever expressed.

We demonstrate it by knowing why we hold an opinion, recognizing what supports it, and remaining capable of changing it when the facts justify doing so.

Beyond Simply Being Informed

I do not think the answer is to consume less information or to become suspicious of every expert, institution, or technological tool.

Information remains essential. Access to knowledge has created extraordinary opportunities for education, research, and public participation.

The question is what we do with that access.

Do we use information to develop our reasoning, or simply to strengthen opinions we already hold?

Do we seek explanations that challenge our assumptions, or only those that make us feel more certain?

And when we speak confidently about an issue, can we explain the reasoning behind our conclusions?

These questions matter because a society can become increasingly informed without necessarily becoming more thoughtful.

We can recognize more names, follow more events, and participate in more discussions while still struggling to distinguish between what we have learned and what we have merely repeated.

Understanding is not measured by the number of subjects we can discuss or the confidence with which we express our opinions.

It is reflected in the quality of our questions, the care we bring to examining evidence, and our ability to recognize when our knowledge is incomplete.

Maybe that is what deserves more attention in an age of unlimited information.

Not how quickly we can find an answer, or how convincingly we can repeat it.

But whether we have taken the time to understand what we are saying.

Racha Khouli

Founder, Global Education Services

Doctor of Business Administration (Leadership) Candidate

I write about leadership, education, and the human judgment required in an age of speed, automation, and constant change.

References

Fisher, M., Goddu, M. K., & Keil, F. C. (2015). Searching for explanations: How the Internet inflates estimates of internal knowledge. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(3), 674 — 687. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000070

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Rozenblit, L., & Keil, F. C. (2002). The misunderstood limits of folk science: An illusion of explanatory depth. Cognitive Science, 26(5), 521 — 562. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog2605_1

Why Being Informed Is Not the Same as Understanding was originally published in Thoughts & Reflections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We may have encountered organizations where every department appears to be performing well. Programs are delivered, procedures are followed, targets are met, and performance reports present an encouraging picture.

Yet a question remains:

Is all of this enough to conclude that an organization has truly succeeded?

This question has become increasingly meaningful to me as I reflect on my earlier professional experience in internal audit and business process improvement, followed by my work as a pension fund board member.

Over time, my understanding of organizational success has gradually evolved.

I once focused primarily on how work could be performed effectively. More recently, I have found myself thinking more deeply about the value that all this work is ultimately intended to create.

When Dividing Work Leads to Disconnected Processes

During my earlier experience in internal audit and business process improvement, I learned the importance of viewing organizational activities as part of an end-to-end process, from the emergence of a need to the delivery of something valuable to those being served.

In practice, of course, no single person or department can handle everything.

As organizations grow, responsibilities must be divided according to expertise, authority, and manageable spans of control. This division of work allows organizations to operate with greater clarity and discipline.

Yet there is a consequence we may not always recognize.

The clearer the division of responsibilities becomes, the easier it is for each department to focus primarily on its own tasks.

One department considers its work complete when the results are handed over to the next. That department, in turn, has its own responsibilities and measures of success.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this arrangement.

The problem begins when the connections between departments are no longer understood as parts of a larger whole.

Imagine a service that must pass through several departments. Each department follows its procedures, yet the person receiving the service still experiences delays because the information passed along is incomplete.

Every department may have a reasonable explanation.

But from the recipient’s perspective, what matters is not how well each department performed individually. What matters is the experience of the entire process.

Experiences like these led me to explore three practical ways of reconnecting fragmented work.

The first was helping people recognize that their tasks belong to a larger sequence. No activity stands entirely on its own; it is connected to what comes before and what follows.

The second was clarifying roles and responsibilities: who performs the work, who is ultimately accountable, who should be consulted, and who needs to be informed.

The third was encouraging people to recognize that the results of their work become inputs for someone else. The quality of our work should therefore also be judged by how well it enables the next person or team to perform their responsibilities.

In management practice, these approaches are reflected in Process Hierarchy, RACI, and the principle that The Next Process Is Our Customer.

For me, however, their greatest value lies not in the terminology itself, but in a simple realization:

Although work must be divided across departments, our shared responsibility for creating value should never be fragmented.

We divide work to make organizations manageable. But we must reconnect processes to ensure that all this work creates value as a whole.

When Delivering Results Is Not the End of the Journey

My experience as a pension fund board member later brought another dimension to this understanding.

I began asking myself a different question:

What if organizations looked beyond what they successfully deliver and paid greater attention to the changes those results are intended to bring about?

In pension fund management, for example, paying pension benefits accurately and on time is an essential responsibility.

It is a result that must be delivered reliably.

Yet behind every pension payment is a person navigating a new chapter of life.

Some are preparing to leave their working years behind. Others are adjusting to changes in income and daily routines. Still others are rediscovering their roles, social connections, and sense of purpose after retirement.

Through this experience, the distinction between output, outcome, and impact became much more meaningful to me.

Output refers to what an organization delivers.

Outcome refers to the changes or benefits that are expected to result for those being served.

Impact concerns the broader, longer-term effects to which those outcomes may contribute.

In the context of a pension fund, paying pension benefits is an output. Greater financial security and improved retirement readiness may be outcomes. A retirement lived with greater dignity, independence, and meaning represents part of the broader impact we hope to support.

Of course, not every dimension of a person’s life falls within the responsibility or control of a pension fund.

Health, family relationships, social connections, independence, and a sense of purpose are influenced by many factors.

It would be unrealistic to attribute every positive change in a retiree’s life to the work of a single organization.

Still, understanding participants’ lives more holistically can help an organization recognize where it might make a meaningful contribution, whether through its own services or through collaboration with others.

This led me to consider an intriguing possibility.

What if organizations expanded their definition of success beyond delivering outputs to achieving outcomes, while also understanding their contribution to longer-term impact?

To me, such a shift is not simply about adding more performance indicators.

It represents a different way of understanding the value an organization exists to create.

When Performance Numbers Do Not Tell the Whole Story

This realization also made me reconsider how organizations evaluate success.

We certainly need targets, indicators, budgets, and accountability reports. Without them, it would be difficult to determine whether resources have been used responsibly and obligations have been fulfilled.

Management rightly emphasizes using resources economically, carrying out activities efficiently, and achieving objectives effectively.

Yet performance measures have their limitations.

We can count the number of activities completed. We can compare actual spending against budgets. We can monitor how quickly tasks are finished.

But does a larger number of activities necessarily mean that participants’ needs have been addressed?

Does a successfully delivered program automatically mean that someone is better prepared for retirement?

Not necessarily.

Some changes take time. Others are difficult to capture through numbers alone.

This is why I increasingly believe that performance measurement should be complemented by a deeper understanding of people’s experiences, needs, and the changes they actually encounter.

This does not mean abandoning existing indicators.

Rather, it means reconnecting those indicators to the larger purpose they are intended to serve.

Performance reports help us understand what has been achieved. Understanding the benefits helps us recognize whether those achievements truly matter.

When Improvement Must Become Lasting Learning

Another lesson from my experience in business process improvement concerns the sustainability of change.

Sometimes a problem is successfully resolved, a procedure is improved, and a better way of working is introduced.

Yet after some time, the same problem returns.

This reminds me that making improvements is not enough. Their results must also be sustained.

In management practice, continuous improvement and standardization need to work together.

Improvement helps organizations discover better ways of working. Standardization helps preserve what has been learned so that progress is not easily lost.

But standards should never become an excuse to stop learning.

As the needs of those we serve evolve, practices that once worked well may need to be reconsidered.

I have come to believe that a continuously developing organization is not one that never encounters problems.

It is one that remains willing to learn from them.

When Change Ultimately Depends on People

Ultimately, every effort to improve processes, clarify responsibilities, and strengthen performance measurement depends on the people who bring these systems to life.

An organization may have well-designed procedures and sophisticated systems.

But what happens when people recognize a problem and choose to remain silent?

What happens when someone has an idea for improvement but worries that speaking up will be perceived as unwelcome criticism?

Amy Edmondson’s concept of psychological safety offers an important perspective here.

It highlights the importance of creating a workplace where people can ask questions, share concerns, and acknowledge mistakes without fear of humiliation.

To me, this complements everything I have learned about processes and systems.

Organizations need more than people who can perform their assigned tasks well.

They also need people who are willing to listen, question established practices when necessary, and work together to discover better approaches.

A learning culture grows when problems can be discussed openly and experiences can become opportunities for collective learning.

Perhaps this is where we begin to realize that organizational change is not merely about redesigning structures or refining procedures.

It is also about how people treat one another, listen to one another, and learn together.

From Connected Processes to Meaningful Outcomes

Looking back on these experiences, I have begun to see a deeper connection between the different dimensions of organizational management.

An organization needs a purpose that provides direction: why it exists and what value it hopes to create.

It needs connected processes, clearly defined responsibilities, meaningful performance measures, the ability to improve continuously, and a culture that enables people to keep learning.

These six dimensions — purpose, process, organization design, performance management, continuous improvement, and people and culture — are not independent elements.

They need to reinforce one another if an organization is to do more than simply perform its work well.

They need to work together to create meaningful value for the people the organization serves.

This is how I have come to understand the idea of a Value-Centered Organization: an organization that seeks to maintain a meaningful connection between why it exists, how it operates, and the benefits it hopes to create.

My earlier experience in internal audit helped shape my understanding of the importance of reconnecting fragmented processes.

My experience as a pension fund board member deepened my awareness that even well-connected processes may not be enough unless we also connect them to the broader benefits they are intended to bring into people’s lives.

From connected processes to meaningful outcomes.

For me, this is the essence of the journey From Purpose to Impact.

It does not mean that every organization must assume responsibility for every aspect of the lives of those it serves.

But perhaps organizations can create greater value when they move beyond asking only what they have successfully delivered.

They can also ask what changes they hope to help bring about and how they might contribute to meaningful, long-term impact.

In the end, organizational structures, procedures, technologies, and performance indicators are all means to an end.

They help organizations fulfill their responsibilities.

But behind every system, every process, and every performance report are people with their own needs, hopes, and life journeys.

And perhaps, the next time we look at a performance report filled with impressive achievements, there is one question worth asking ourselves:

If every task has been completed and every target has been met, are the people we serve truly experiencing better lives because of what we do?

Conceptual References

This reflection draws on professional experience and management concepts including end-to-end processes, Process Hierarchy, RACI, The Next Process Is Our Customer, Results-Based Management, Continuous Improvement, and Psychological Safety.

• UNDP (2009). Handbook on Planning, Monitoring and Evaluating for Development Results. https://www.undp.org/publications/handbook-planning-monitoring-and-evaluating-development-results
• Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Beyond Getting Things Done: Creating Value That Truly Matters was originally published in Thoughts & Reflections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As artificial intelligence reshapes higher education, universities face a critical challenge ensuring that academic achievement still reflects genuine understanding, independent thinking and intellectual competence.

For years, universities have evaluated students through research papers, written assignments, examinations and presentations. These methods were never perfect, but they offered a reasonable indication of what students understood and how well they could apply their knowledge.

Artificial intelligence is changing that relationship.

A student can now produce a well structured research paper, develop a convincing argument, or analyze a complex business problem with the help of AI. The work may be impressive. It may even meet every requirement of the assignment.

But how much of it reflects the student’s own understanding?

This is where I believe the conversation about AI in higher education needs to become more serious.

We have spent considerable time discussing plagiarism, academic misconduct and whether universities should allow students to use generative AI. These are legitimate concerns, but they do not address the larger issue.

If a university can no longer determine what a student actually understands from the work submitted, how can it confidently certify that student’s competence?

This is not simply a question about technology. It goes to the purpose of higher education and the value of the qualifications universities award.

Using AI Is Not the Same as Learning

I do not believe universities should discourage students from using artificial intelligence. That would make little sense when AI is already becoming part of professional life.

Students entering business, medicine, engineering, law, education and countless other fields will encounter these technologies. Knowing how to use them responsibly will increasingly be part of professional competence.

But there is an important distinction between using AI to support learning and allowing it to do the thinking.

Consider two students working on the same research assignment.

The first uses AI to explore different perspectives, identify gaps in an argument and question conclusions. The student still reads the material, evaluates the evidence and develops an independent position.

The second asks AI to produce the argument, organize the research and write the final paper, making only minor adjustments before submitting it.

Both assignments may receive excellent grades.

Yet the learning behind them is not necessarily comparable.

Research on generative AI in education supports the need to make this distinction. Kasneci and colleagues (2023), writing in Learning and Individual Differences, examined the opportunities and challenges of large language models in education. Their analysis highlighted the potential for personalized learning and educational support while also raising concerns about overreliance, accuracy and the need for critical engagement.

The lesson is not that AI should be excluded from education. It is that the educational value of AI depends considerably on how students use it.

A university education should develop more than the ability to produce acceptable work. It should teach students how to approach unfamiliar problems, recognize weak arguments, question information and make decisions when the answer is not obvious.

Those abilities cannot be measured by the appearance of a finished assignment alone.

What Happens When Students Stop Struggling With Ideas?

There is something about learning that we may be overlooking in our enthusiasm for efficiency.

Not every difficulty is a problem that needs to be eliminated.

When students struggle to understand a difficult concept, organize their thoughts, or defend an argument, they are often doing some of the most important work of education.

The process can be frustrating. It takes time. Sometimes it involves reaching the wrong conclusion and having to begin again.

But that is part of how judgment develops.

Researchers have been examining our tendency to rely on technology for cognitive tasks long before generative AI entered the classroom.

Risko and Gilbert (2016), in their research on cognitive offloading published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, explored how people use external tools and resources to reduce the mental demands of certain tasks.

Cognitive offloading is not inherently harmful. In many situations, it allows people to work more efficiently and devote attention to other problems. But in education, it raises a question worth considering what happens when the task being transferred to technology is itself the skill students are supposed to develop?

AI can help students understand difficult material, test ideas and discover perspectives they might otherwise miss.

Used without reflection, however, it can remove the very intellectual effort that makes an assignment valuable.

I worry less about students using AI and more about students becoming comfortable with answers they cannot explain.

Imagine a graduate entering a professional environment with excellent academic results but limited ability to evaluate information independently. That individual may know how to generate a recommendation but struggle to determine whether it is appropriate.

The difference becomes particularly important when decisions carry real consequences.

An AI system can help develop a financial strategy, assess a business opportunity, or summarize a policy dispute. But someone still needs to understand the assumptions, recognize what might be missing, and take responsibility for the decision.

That is not a skill universities can afford to neglect.

Universities Need to Rethink What They Assess

The traditional research paper is not going to disappear, nor should it. Writing remains an important way to develop and communicate ideas.

But universities may need to stop treating the finished paper as sufficient evidence of understanding.

If a student submits an excellent analysis, perhaps the next question should be simple: Explain how you reached that conclusion.

Why did you choose that argument? What evidence would make you reconsider it? What would change if one of your assumptions proved incorrect?

A student who genuinely understands the material should be able to engage with those questions, even if the answers are not perfect.

This concern is consistent with a longstanding principle in educational assessment: students tend to direct their learning toward what they believe will be evaluated.

Biggs (1996), in his influential work on constructive alignment in higher education, argued that learning activities and assessment should be aligned with the intended learning outcomes.

That principle becomes particularly important when AI can produce work that appears to meet academic expectations without necessarily demonstrating the underlying learning.

If independent reasoning is an intended outcome, assessment must provide meaningful evidence of independent reasoning.

This does not mean every assignment needs to become an oral examination. Different disciplines require different approaches, and universities must remain attentive to fairness and accessibility.

It does mean assessment should give greater attention to the reasoning behind the work.

In business education, for example, students could be asked to defend a recommendation when market conditions change. In international relations, they might be required to reconsider a policy argument when presented with contradictory evidence.

The objective would not be to catch students using AI.

It would be to understand whether they have developed the ability to think beyond what AI produces.

There is a meaningful difference between knowing an answer and understanding why it makes sense.

This Is Also a Leadership Problem

Much of the responsibility for adapting to AI has been placed on students and faculty members.

Students are told to use AI responsibly. Faculty members are encouraged to redesign assignments, update grading practices, and identify inappropriate uses of technology.

But where does institutional leadership fit into this conversation?

Universities cannot continue to promote innovation while expecting academic assessment to remain largely unchanged.

Nor is it reasonable to ask faculty to transform teaching practices without providing the time, resources, and professional development necessary to do so.

A university may publish an impressive AI policy, establish a committee, or announce a strategy for responsible technology adoption. None of those actions, by themselves, demonstrates that students are learning more effectively.

The real test is what changes in the classroom.

Are faculty members receiving meaningful support? Are assessment methods being reconsidered? Are universities examining whether students can demonstrate independent judgment? And are institutional leaders willing to question practices that have been accepted for decades?

These are difficult questions because they require more than technological investment. They require academic and organizational change.

Leadership in higher education should not be measured by how quickly an institution adopts AI.

It should be measured, in part, by whether the institution can use new technologies without compromising the educational standards it exists to protect.

The Value of a Degree Is Built on Trust

There is another reason this conversation matters.

A university degree represents more than the completion of a series of assignments. It carries an expectation that the graduate has acquired a certain level of knowledge and competence.

Employers rely on that expectation. Professional organizations rely on it. Students themselves invest years of their lives and substantial financial resources because they believe the qualification will mean something.

But what happens when academic performance becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from technological assistance?

A student may graduate with strong grades and an impressive portfolio. Yet if the university has not adequately assessed independent understanding, those achievements may tell employers less than they once did.

This does not mean degrees are becoming irrelevant. I believe they remain valuable.

But their credibility cannot be taken for granted.

If universities fail to adapt their assessment practices, employers may increasingly rely on their own tests, practical evaluations, or demonstrations of competence.

That would raise an uncomfortable question about the role of higher education.

If employers must independently verify the abilities that universities are expected to assess, what does that suggest about the confidence placed in academic qualifications?

Universities should not wait for that question to become a widespread concern before addressing it.

We Should Be Developing Better Thinkers, Not Just Better AI Users

I am optimistic about what artificial intelligence can contribute to education.

It can make knowledge more accessible, support students who need additional guidance, help faculty develop learning materials, and create opportunities for research that would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago.

There is no reason to treat these developments as threats simply because they challenge familiar practices.

But we should also be careful about what we define as progress.

A student who completes an assignment in twenty minutes instead of three hours has certainly become more efficient. Whether that student has learned more is a separate question.

The same applies to universities.

Introducing AI tools into classrooms does not automatically improve education. Increasing productivity does not necessarily improve understanding. And producing more sophisticated academic work does not always mean developing more sophisticated thinkers.

The value of AI in education should be judged by what it enables students to understand and accomplish, not simply by how much work it allows them to produce.

I would argue that independent judgment becomes more important, not less, as AI becomes more capable.

When technology can generate convincing explanations and recommendations within seconds, the ability to question those outputs becomes essential.

Students need to recognize when information is incomplete, when reasoning is flawed, and when a seemingly reasonable answer overlooks important human, ethical, or practical considerations.

They also need the confidence to disagree with an AI-generated conclusion.

That confidence comes from knowledge, experience, and the habit of thinking independently.

Universities have a responsibility to develop all three.

The Question We Cannot Keep Avoiding

Artificial intelligence did not create every weakness in academic assessment.

Universities have long struggled with the difference between memorization and understanding, between strong grades and genuine competence, and between completing academic requirements and developing intellectual maturity.

AI has simply made those weaknesses more difficult to ignore.

It has also created an opportunity to reconsider what higher education should accomplish.

And maybe the most important change will not be a new technology policy or another method of detecting AI-generated writing.

Maybe it will be a more serious commitment to evaluating how students think, how they respond to uncertainty, and whether they can apply their knowledge without depending entirely on a technological system.

That will require universities to reconsider established practices. It will require faculty support, thoughtful leadership, and a willingness to accept that some familiar methods of assessment may no longer be sufficient.

But the responsibility is worth taking seriously.

A university should be able to explain not only what its graduates have studied, but what they have learned to do with that knowledge.

I believe this is where the future of higher education will be decided.

The question is not whether students will use artificial intelligence. Because they will. The question is , after years of education and increasingly sophisticated technological assistance, will they leave the university with stronger minds, better judgment, and the ability to think for themselves?

That is what a degree should still represent.

References

Biggs, J. (1996). Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment. Higher Education, 32, 347 — 364.

https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00138871

Kasneci, E., et al. (2023). ChatGPT for good? On opportunities and challenges of large language models for education. Learning and Individual Differences, 103, 102274.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2023.102274

Risko, E. F., & Gilbert, S. J. (2016). Cognitive offloading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(9), 676 — 688.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.07.002

Racha Khouli

Founder, Global Education Services

DBA (Leadership) Candidate

I write about leadership, education, and the human judgment required in an age of speed, automation, and constant change.

The Growing Divide Between Academic Performance and Intellectual Ability was originally published in Thoughts & Reflections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Fair warning: this one gets personal. I’m about to tell you about the day I made a phone call so bad I cried into my pillow afterward. So buckle up.

Also, quick disclaimer before we start: I’m a tutor with 8+ years of teaching experience, but nobody’s getting a linguistics lecture today. No boring terminology, no academic detours. Just a simple, very painful question, explained in plain language.

The Question That Never Leaves

You know the one. It shows up right before you open your mouth in Spanish, French, German, whatever language you picked this year and swore you’d finally learn.

What if I sound stupid?

For teenagers, it’s brutal. Self-esteem is a house of cards at 15, and one laugh from a classmate can knock the whole thing down.

For adults, it’s a different flavor of the same fear. You’ve got a mortgage. A LinkedIn photo where you look competent. Somewhere along the way your prefrontal cortex finished baking (hi, 25-year-olds, congrats on your fully formed brain) and now regressing to toddler-level speech feels like a personal insult.

“I’m 34, I run a team of 12, and I still can’t speak English without sweating.”
— a comment I got.

So this fear doesn’t really go away with age. It just changes clothes.

Apparently, adulthood comes with bills, responsibilities, and the same fear you had in high school. What a package deal.

The Time I Cried After a 3-Minute Phone Call

By the time this happened, I’d been studying Polish for years. Grammar? Solid. Writing? Great. A company called me and offered to let me practice speaking on a real work call. I said yes immediately, because obviously.

Three minutes in, they hung up.

I had greeted them with “Good evening.” It was 9 am.

Then I fumbled two more phrases that made zero sense in context, panicked, and just stopped being useful on that call. They hung up. I really wanted to get my first job and become a sales manager.

No way…

I sat on my bed and cried, fully convinced I was a failure who’d wasted years of study.

Here’s the twist: I knew Polish. I could write essays in it. I’d just never actually spoken it under pressure, so my brain had nothing to draw on except panic.

That call didn’t stop me. It’s what made me start training speaking on purpose, the same way you’d train a muscle you’d never used.

My Friends Have the Same Excuse

I have friends who’ve wanted to learn a language for years. I won’t name names. I love them too much for that. But every time, it’s the same excuse:

• They’ll sound like idiots.
• They’ll make mistakes.
• A teacher will constantly correct them and quietly judge them for it.

I tell them, over and over, that AI solves exactly this problem. No judgment, no sighing.

And they agree. Every time. Then nothing happens.

Because the AI was never the missing piece, yep?

The missing piece is starting. Finding that one crumb of motivation to actually open the app and say the first sentence out loud.

We have successfully identified the problem: the terrifying act of pressing “start.”

So, if I were in my friends’ shoes — or in yours, dear reader — I’d start with something a little less painful.

So Here’s Actually What Fixes It

Here, you’ll get the truth and nothing but the truth.

Quick honesty moment: I genuinely love language-learning apps. I use them myself. But as a break, a kill 15 minutes on the bus activity, something for traffic jams or waiting rooms, not as your main method.

For the actual fear, the one that made me cry in bed, apps aren’t the answer. The answer is:

• Speaking
• Speaking
• Speaking

Two techniques, and let’s go from easier to harder.

Step 1: Shadowing.

You listen to a native speaker and repeat right after them, matching rhythm and intonation.

This one’s simpler because you’re not generating your own sentences yet. You’re just moving your mouth, literally training the muscles you’ll need later. And that matters more than people think.

Think about it: public speaking coaches charge real money to teach adults how to control pace, rhythm, and breath while talking. Shadowing is the free version of that same training.

Yep. You read that right.

Step 2: Actual speaking practice.

Real conversation, mess and hesitation included. Harder, because now you’re producing language on the spot.

Ideal version: move to the country, get a tutor, live inside the language 24/7. Most of us don’t have that option this week.

Realistic version, the one I actually recommend to my students right now: a voice companion. Yes, I mean ChatGPT’s voice mode.

When did you last actually talk to it out loud? Or is this news to you?

I once gave a student homework to talk to AI outside our lessons. I know how that sounds, like I’m actively working myself out of a paying student. But it’s not a replacement. It’s a tool that does the repetitive part so our actual lessons go further.

“I stopped rehearsing sentences in my head before saying them out loud.”
— that student, a few weeks in.

1. Shadowing,
2. Then speaking practice.

Write it down.

So What Do You Actually Do Now?

If you’ve read this far, you already know the “what if I sound stupid” question isn’t really about language. Because it’s about permission to be bad at something in public, briefly, on your way to being good at it.

Here’s your move:

• Pick one phrase from a video you shadow before speaking and repeat it until it’s automatic.
• Open your voice companion today.
• Talk out loud for anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes, whatever you’ve got in you.
• Do it again tomorrow.

And one last thing.

You just need to be brave enough to sound like a clumsy for long enough to stop being one.

Remember my three-minute phone call? To that version of myself, I wish I could go back and say that one clumsy conversation was not evidence I’d wasted years learning Polish. It was evidence that I now had something concrete to work with.

Say something silly, laugh about it, and do it again.

Your next talk doesn’t have to be right. It just has to be you.

And if you’re working out your own language learning journey, well, you’re home now.

If you want more honest stories, practical advice, and some uncomfortable truths about how people learn languages — minus any magic solutions, no promise of fluency in a day — come read what really helps over on my Medium blog.

And if you want to take things further, check out my product through the link in my profile.

“What If I Sound Stupid?” — I Once Cried Over a 3-Minute Phone Call was originally published in Thoughts & Reflections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The future of learning is not about choosing between artificial intelligence and human thinking. It is about becoming more intentional about what each should do.

Artificial intelligence is making an old assumption increasingly difficult to defend that learning can be measured by how much information a person can produce independently.

For generations, education was shaped by a world in which information was harder to access. Research took time. Finding the right sources could consume hours. Writing required us to gather, organize, summarize, and communicate information largely on our own.

AI changes that equation.

Today, a student can generate a summary, compare competing ideas, receive feedback on a draft, translate complex material, explore a new concept, or begin researching a question in minutes.

I do not see this as a threat to education.

I see it as an opportunity to raise the standard.

If AI can take over some of the mechanical work surrounding knowledge, perhaps we should stop asking students to prove themselves primarily through tasks that technology can increasingly perform. Instead, we can ask more of them where human capability matters most , judgment, curiosity, context, creativity, ethical reasoning and the ability to recognize when a convincing answer is not necessarily a good one.

That distinction is important.

There is little educational value in preserving difficulty simply because something used to be difficult. Education has always evolved alongside technology. Calculators did not eliminate mathematics. Search engines did not eliminate research. Digital libraries did not make scholarship irrelevant.

They changed what we were able to expect from learners.

AI should do the same.

Now the question is not whether students should struggle.

The more interesting question is What should they struggle with?

Maybe students should spend less time assembling information and more time interrogating it.

Perhaps the challenge should move from producing an answer to defending why that answer deserves to be trusted.

Perhaps assessment should place greater value on how a student reached a conclusion, what assumptions were questioned, what alternatives were considered, and whether the student can recognize the limitations of both human and machine-generated reasoning.

This is where the conversation about AI literacy needs to go further.

Knowing how to use AI is becoming important. Knowing how to prompt a system, refine its output, and integrate these tools into research and professional work will increasingly be part of being digitally competent.

But knowing how to use AI is not the same as knowing how to think.

In fact, the more capable these systems become, the easier it may become to confuse the two.

A sophisticated answer can appear on a screen in seconds. It can be articulate, organized, confident, and still contain weak reasoning, missing context, questionable assumptions, or factual errors.

That creates one of the great educational paradoxes of the AI era

The easier it becomes to obtain an answer, the more important it becomes to know enough to question one.

And that requires knowledge.

We sometimes talk about critical thinking as though it exists independently of subject knowledge. It does not. A student cannot meaningfully challenge an economic argument without understanding economics. A future physician cannot evaluate an AI generated recommendation without medical knowledge. A business leader cannot judge an AI generated strategy without understanding markets, organizations, people and consequences.

AI therefore does not make knowledge less important.

It may make the relationship between knowledge and judgment even more important.

This also changes the role of educators.

The educator of the AI era cannot simply be the person standing between students and information. Information is already everywhere.

The greater responsibility may be helping students learn what to do with it.

That means creating learning environments where students are expected to question outputs, compare perspectives, explain decisions, recognize uncertainty, revise their thinking and sometimes disagree with the technology in front of them.

It also means accepting that AI belongs in the learning environment.

Trying to recreate a world in which students do everything without AI may eventually become as unrealistic as asking professionals to work without search engines, spreadsheets, or digital communication.

Students need experience using these systems responsibly because they will encounter them far beyond the classroom.

But responsible integration requires boundaries.

There will still be moments when students need to think without assistance. There will be foundational knowledge they need to possess themselves. There will be assessments where educators need to know what a student understands rather than what a student and an AI system can produce together.

And there will be other moments when refusing AI would make little sense.

The challenge for universities is learning to distinguish between them.

That is why I believe the future of AI in education should not be framed as a choice between embracing technology and protecting human intelligence.

We need both.

The real opportunity is to use artificial intelligence to remove the right kinds of friction while deliberately preserving the intellectual experiences through which people develop judgment.

We should not protect old tasks simply because they are familiar. Nor should we automate every task simply because we can.

Instead, higher education has an opportunity to ask a much larger question

What kind of human capability becomes more valuable when intelligence is increasingly available on demand?

That question reaches far beyond the classroom.

The graduates entering tomorrow’s workplaces will operate alongside increasingly capable AI systems. Their advantage will not necessarily come from producing information faster than a machine.

It will come from knowing what to ask, what to trust, what to challenge, what matters, and ultimately, what to do.

AI can help us research faster, explore further, test ideas, personalize learning, and remove enormous amounts of unnecessary friction. We should use those capabilities.

But the measure of successful AI integration in education will not be how much work we manage to automate.

It will be whether the people emerging from our educational institutions are better able to think, judge, question, create and decide because of it.

The opportunity is not to make education easier. It is to make education better.

Racha Khouli

Founder, Global Education Services

Doctor of Business Administration (Leadership) Candidate

I write about leadership, education, and the human judgment required in an age of speed, automation, and constant change.

AI Is Changing What It Means to Be Educated was originally published in Thoughts & Reflections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A former neighbour of mine, a quietly determined woman I watched grow up, once called me in tears midway through the second year of what she had always described, proudly, as her “fully funded scholarship abroad.” Not because anything terrible had happened. Because a letter had arrived saying her funding would not continue unless she raised a grade that had slipped during a term when her father was ill back home.

She read me the letter over the phone, her voice catching on the word “conditional,” a word she said she did not remember ever seeing in anything she had signed. I did not have the terms document in front of me that night, only her memory of it, but I suspected, and later confirmed, that the word had been there all along, sitting quietly in a paragraph she had read quickly, months earlier, in the middle of one of the most overwhelming weeks of her life.

I could hear, underneath the tears, something closer to bewilderment than panic, the particular confusion of someone who feels she has been careful and still ended up somewhere she did not expect. That combination, care and surprise sitting together, is what made me want to see the actual document rather than simply reassure her over the phone.

The Word She Did Not Remember Reading

I want to walk through what that week had actually looked like for her, because I think it explains a great deal about how a word like “conditional” can go unnoticed even by someone as careful as she generally was. She had received the scholarship offer on a Tuesday. By Thursday, she had resigned from her teaching position, given notice on her flat, and begun the visa paperwork. The following week involved goodbye dinners, a difficult conversation with her mother about moving so far away, and the quiet, exhausting logistics of closing down one life to begin another.

Somewhere in that same fortnight, a document had arrived by email, longer and denser than the offer letter itself, titled something like “Terms and Conditions of Award.” She told me she remembered opening it, scrolling through it, and feeling a kind of relief when nothing in the first few paragraphs seemed to contradict what she already understood the scholarship to be. She did not read every line as carefully as she might have on a quieter week. Nobody, I think, would have.

She told me later that she had actually printed it, at some point, intending to read it properly on the flight over, and then had spent most of that flight sleeping instead, exhausted from the weeks before it. The document sat in her bag, technically read once, effectively unread, for the better part of a year.

The clause about renewal, when I finally found it in the document she forwarded me that night, was not hidden in fine print or written in deliberately confusing language. It was simply one paragraph among many, using ordinary, clear sentences, placed roughly two-thirds of the way through a document she had skimmed during the busiest fortnight of her adult life. It said, plainly, that continuation into the second year required maintaining a minimum grade average. She had read those words. She simply had not absorbed them as something that might one day apply directly to her, during a term made difficult by circumstances entirely outside her control.

I read that paragraph three or four times myself before I fully registered how ordinary it looked. There was no bold text, no underline, nothing to separate it visually from the sentence before it about submission deadlines or the sentence after it about contact procedures. It sat there, unremarkable, carrying more weight than almost anything else in the document, and looking exactly as unremarkable as everything around it.

The Problem Beneath the Surprise

On the surface, this looks like a simple case of not reading closely enough, and there is truth in that. But I think the more useful question is why a genuinely careful, genuinely intelligent person can read a sentence and not really take it in, and I do not think the answer has much to do with carelessness at all.

Two documents typically arrive together when a scholarship is offered, and they are written with entirely different purposes in mind. The first, the announcement, exists to communicate excitement and value quickly: you have been selected, this is what you will receive, this is how long it lasts. It is short, warm, and easy to remember, precisely because it is meant to be remembered. The second, the terms, exists to protect the provider and clarify obligations precisely: what is expected of you, what happens if circumstances change, what conditions must continue to be met. It is long, careful, and, by necessity, considerably less exciting to read.

The trouble is that both documents arrive at the same moment, usually the most emotionally significant moment in the entire process, and only one of them is written in a way that matches the emotional register of that moment. The announcement feels like the scholarship. The terms document feels like paperwork, something to be filed away once glanced at, rather than something to actually absorb. I do not think this is a flaw in the reader. I think it is simply what happens when a joyful, short document and a careful, long document arrive together, and only one of them is designed to be felt as well as read.

There is a second layer to this too, which I think matters just as much. Reading a legal or administrative document carefully requires a kind of mental space that excitement actively crowds out. My neighbour was not in a calm, reflective state that fortnight. She was resigning from a job, saying goodbye to friends, comforting a worried mother, and packing an entire life into a small number of suitcases. Expecting careful, close reading of a dense document from someone in that state is expecting something that very few people, however diligent, can actually deliver without deliberately setting aside quiet time specifically for that purpose, time that rarely presents itself on its own during a week like that.

I think about this particular kind of tiredness often, the specific exhaustion of someone managing several enormous life changes at once. It is not the tiredness of overwork in the ordinary sense. It is the tiredness of holding too many decisions in mind simultaneously, a visa appointment, a goodbye dinner, a worried parent, a document to read, each one competing for the same small reserve of attention that a calmer week would have distributed far more generously.

Why the First Reading Rarely Catches Everything

A first reading of a scholarship’s terms tends to search for confirmation rather than for new information, and this shapes what actually gets noticed.

When my neighbour opened that document, she was not reading to discover unknown facts. She was reading, largely without realising it, to confirm what she already believed: that she had received a generous, two-year, fully funded scholarship. Every sentence that matched this belief- descriptions of tuition coverage, the stipend amount, the university’s reputation- registered clearly and reassuringly. Sentences that complicated this picture, like the renewal clause, were read with the same eyes but somehow processed differently, filed away as procedural detail rather than as something that directly described her own possible future.

This is not a rare or unusual failure of attention. It is, I think, how most of us read almost anything exciting for the first time, skimming for confirmation of the good news we are hoping to find, and giving comparatively less weight to the parts that complicate it. A terms document, unfortunately, is precisely the kind of document where the complicating parts are often the ones that matter most in the long run.

There is also something about the specific language of these documents that makes them easy to underweight. Words like “conditional,” “subject to,” and “satisfactory progress” are administrative, almost bureaucratic in tone, and they do not carry the emotional weight that their consequences actually deserve. A sentence that could, eighteen months later, determine whether a difficult term becomes a manageable setback or a genuine crisis is often written in exactly the same flat, procedural voice as a sentence about submission formats or contact email addresses. The document gives no visual or tonal signal that some sentences matter enormously more than others.

I sometimes wonder whether providers could do more here, formatting the genuinely consequential clauses differently from the routine administrative ones. Some do. Many do not, perhaps because from the provider’s side, every clause feels equally important, since each one exists for a reason and has presumably mattered to some previous recipient at some point. But from the reader’s side, in that first overwhelmed week, a little visual hierarchy would go a long way toward making sure the right sentences land with the weight they deserve.

What People Often Miss

A handful of specific misunderstandings tend to recur, not because people are careless, but because these particular areas rarely receive the same attention as the headline funding amount.

A multi-year award is not always secured from year one. The word “two-year” in a scholarship’s name describes its intended full length, not necessarily a guarantee that applies from the moment you are selected. Many multi-year awards renew annually, and the difference between “two years of funding” and “funding renewed annually across two years, subject to conditions” is enormous in practice, even though both descriptions might reasonably be summarised the same way in casual conversation.

That taxes and work rules follow a single, simple pattern. Whether a stipend is taxed, and whether outside work is permitted, depends on a combination of national law and the scholarship’s own specific rules, and these two sources do not always say the same thing. Assuming that because a friend on a different scholarship, in a different country, was not taxed, the same must be true for you is a comparison that frequently does not hold.

That family circumstances are automatically accounted for. A scholarship built around a single student’s tuition and living costs rarely extends automatically to a spouse or child who might travel with them. This is not a hidden or unusual policy; it is simply a detail that a headline description, focused on communicating the scholarship’s value to the student, has no particular reason to mention.

That a difficult term is treated the same everywhere. Some providers build in genuine flexibility for a single hard term, understanding that illness, family circumstances, or other disruptions happen to real people. Others apply their stated requirements strictly, without exception, from the very first assessment period. There is no universal rule here, which makes checking your own specific provider’s approach one of the most valuable things you can do early, long before you might ever need to rely on that answer.

That the terms document only matters if something goes wrong. It is tempting to file a terms document away, unread beyond the first pass, on the assumption that it will only become relevant if a problem arises, and problems, we tend to hope, happen to other people. But the document is most useful precisely when read before anything has gone wrong, while there is still time to plan around what it says rather than simply react to it.

A Slower Second Reading

Here is what I would suggest to anyone receiving a scholarship offer, not instead of the excitement, but alongside it, once the initial celebration has had a little time to settle.

Find a quiet hour, deliberately, away from the flurry of resignation letters and goodbye plans, and read the terms document a second time, slowly, with a pen or a highlighter in hand. This second reading has a different purpose than the first. The first reading confirms that the offer is what you believe it to be. The second reading is meant to surface everything the first reading understandably skimmed past.

As you read this second time, look specifically for four kinds of sentences: any sentence describing what must continue to be true for funding to continue, any sentence requiring advance approval before you make a significant change to your programme, any sentence touching on tax or outside work, and any sentence, or notable absence of one, addressing family or dependents. These four categories account for the overwhelming majority of misunderstandings people encounter later, and deliberately hunting for them, rather than hoping to notice them by chance, makes a real difference.

Where anything remains unclear after this second reading, write a short, specific email to the provider, asking your question plainly, and keep their written reply somewhere safe. A written answer, unlike a verbal reassurance in a hallway conversation or an informal chat, is something you can actually rely on and refer back to if a question arises again later.

I would add one small, practical suggestion here: date your notes. When my neighbour eventually went back to that document, months later, in a moment of crisis, she could not immediately recall whether she had actually read the renewal clause the first time or simply scrolled past it. A dated note, even a single line, “read this, understood renewal is annual, checked,” would have removed all doubt and let her act with more confidence from the very first phone call.

And where you find a genuinely difficult condition, a strict renewal requirement, a limited tolerance for a difficult term, do not treat this as reason to distrust the offer. Treat it instead as useful, actionable information. Knowing in advance that a single hard term could put your funding at risk lets you plan around that risk deliberately, seeking support early if a term does become difficult, rather than discovering the stakes only once a letter like the one my neighbour received has already arrived.

Before and After: Changing What the Second Year Feels Like

Let me imagine my neighbour’s story unfolding a second time, with one change made in that first overwhelming fortnight.

In the first version, the one that actually happened, the terms document is skimmed once, during the busiest week of her life; its important clause absorbed but not truly registered. Eighteen months later, a difficult term collides with that unread understanding, and the collision arrives as a frightening letter rather than as an anticipated, manageable risk.

In the second version, a quiet hour is found sometime in that same fortnight, perhaps not the ideal moment, but a real one nonetheless. The renewal clause is found, highlighted, and understood clearly for what it is: not a threat, but a condition to plan around. When the difficult term arrives eighteen months later, her father’s illness weighing on her exactly as it did in the first version, she already knows what is at stake. She reaches out to her programme coordinator early, explains the circumstances, and asks whether any flexibility or extension exists. The outcome may or may not be different in the end. What is different is that she meets the difficult term with a plan already in place, rather than a shock arriving on top of it.

The distance between these two versions is not effort in any general sense, and it is certainly not intelligence. It is a single, quiet hour, found once, early, before the excitement of the offer had a chance to make the dense, unglamorous parts of the document feel unimportant by comparison.

I think there is something worth sitting with in how small that distance really is. An entire year of stress, in the first version, traces back to a single hour that was never quite found in a fortnight otherwise full of goodbyes and packing. It is a strange kind of leverage, one quiet hour against an entire difficult year, and it is available to almost anyone willing to set the hour aside deliberately rather than hoping it will happen on its own.

The Practical Lesson

If I could leave you with one thought from my neighbour’s story, it would be this: a scholarship’s headline tells you what you have been given. Its terms tell you what you must continue to do to keep it, and only the second document can actually prepare you for what the experience will really be like.

What should you do differently? When an offer arrives, celebrate it fully, and then, once the initial excitement has had a little time to settle, find a quiet hour to read the terms a second time, specifically hunting for renewal conditions, approval requirements, tax and work rules, and anything about family or dependents.

What should you avoid? Avoid assuming that a first, excited reading has captured everything that matters. The sentences most likely to matter later are often the ones written in the flattest, least memorable language, precisely because they describe obligations rather than benefits.

The principle worth carrying forward is simple: read once for the excitement, and read again for the plan. My neighbour did keep her funding, in the end, after a genuinely stressful few months of extra effort. She tells me now, with the particular clarity that only comes from having lived through something, that she reads every document twice now, no matter how busy the week, and that the second reading has never once felt like wasted time.

Next step

If you have received a scholarship offer and want a structured way to check what it actually asks of you before you make other decisions around it, this free guide is a useful place to start:

Before You Apply: A Decision Guide for Choosing Better-Fit International Scholarships.

It helps you look past the headline to the parts of the offer that matter most in the long run.

Common Misunderstandings About Fully Funded Scholarships: What Should Students Look Beyond? was originally published in Thoughts & Reflections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I have a cousin who is, without exaggeration, one of the most capable people I know. Strong grades, genuine curiosity, the kind of work ethic that makes other people a little uncomfortable by comparison. When she decided to pursue a funded master’s degree abroad, I assumed the only real question was which offer she would eventually choose between.

She did not receive any offers. Not because she was rejected. She never actually applied to the two scholarships that fit her best, because by the time she felt ready to start the applications, both had already closed. I think about her often when this topic comes up, because her story is not really about ability at all. It is about something quieter and much easier to overlook.

The Spreadsheet She Never Finished

I remember the evening she showed me her plan, because she was proud of it, and she had every reason to be. A spreadsheet, colour-coded, listing eight scholarships she had found, each with a column for eligibility, deadline, and required documents. It looked, at a glance, like exactly the kind of careful preparation that should lead somewhere good.

I remember, too, how she talked about it, with a kind of quiet satisfaction that comes from doing something properly. She walked me through her colour coding, explained why she had ranked one scholarship above another, and asked what I thought of her reasoning. I told her it looked excellent, because it did. Neither of us thought to ask a different question that evening, one that had nothing to do with the quality of her thinking and everything to do with the calendar sitting quietly behind it.

What the spreadsheet did not show, because spreadsheets rarely show this kind of thing, was how much of her actual time was going into refining the spreadsheet itself rather than acting on it. She kept finding one more scholarship to add, one more detail to research, one more comparison to make between two similar-looking options. Each of these felt like real progress, and in a narrow sense it was. But the two scholarships that matched her field and her background most closely both had deadlines a little over two months away, and she had not yet requested a single transcript, or asked a single professor for a reference.

I did not notice this at the time either, if I am honest. It was only weeks later, when she mentioned in passing that a reference letter she needed would take “about three weeks, apparently,” that the shape of the problem became visible to both of us at once. Three weeks for one document. She had, by that point, less than three weeks left before the earlier of the two deadlines.

There is a particular kind of regret in realising, after the fact, that you had all the information needed to see a problem coming, and simply never asked the one question that would have surfaced it. I do not say this to be hard on either of us. I say it because I think this exact blind spot is remarkably common, and naming it clearly is the only real defence against it.

The Problem Beneath the Spreadsheet

On the surface, this looks like a simple scheduling error, and in the narrowest sense it was. But I think the more interesting question is why someone this capable, this careful, this genuinely diligent, ended up in exactly this position. It was not a lack of effort. If anything, there was almost too much effort, aimed in a direction that felt productive without actually being urgent.

I think the deeper issue is that research and preparation feel like the same activity, when they are actually quite different, and only one of them has a clock attached to it. Researching scholarships, comparing options, refining a shortlist- all of this can continue almost indefinitely without any external deadline forcing it to stop. It feels responsible, even virtuous, the way thorough homework feels virtuous. Preparation- requesting a transcript, asking a referee, booking a language test- has a different character entirely. It depends on other people and other institutions, moving at their own pace, on their own schedule, regardless of how ready you personally feel to start.

My cousin spent weeks in the first mode, refining her spreadsheet, and treated the second mode as something she would begin once the research was complete, as though preparation were a final step rather than a parallel one. This is, I think, an extremely common and extremely understandable mistake, because research gives you a comforting sense of control. You can always find one more detail to check. Preparation, by contrast, immediately exposes you to things outside your control: a professor’s holiday schedule, a university registrar’s processing time, a test centre’s limited available dates. It is natural to spend more time in the mode that feels safe and less time in the mode that feels uncertain, even when the uncertain mode is the one with an actual deadline attached.

I have caught myself doing a version of this too, in entirely different contexts, reorganising a to-do list instead of doing the hardest item on it, polishing a plan instead of starting the part of the plan that depends on someone else’s schedule. There is something almost soothing about research and organisation precisely because they ask nothing of anyone but you. The moment a task depends on another person’s calendar, it stops being soothing and starts being real, which may be exactly why so many of us delay starting it.

There is something else worth naming too. A well-organised spreadsheet creates its own kind of false comfort. Looking at eight rows of neatly filled cells feels like progress, and in a sense it is progress, just not the kind that moves an application closer to being submitted. It is entirely possible to feel highly organised and be, in the ways that actually matter for a deadline, dangerously behind.

I think of this now as the difference between motion and progress. My cousin was in almost constant motion that month, researching, comparing, refining. But motion toward a spreadsheet and progress toward a submitted application are not the same thing, and it took an offhand comment about a reference letter to reveal just how far apart the two had drifted.

Why the First Impression of “Plenty of Time” Can Be Misleading

A year, or even six months, sounds like a great deal of time when a scholarship search first begins. I think this feeling deserves a closer look, because it is almost always wrong in a specific, predictable way.

The mistake is not that six months is too short in some absolute sense. It is that six months of calendar time and six months of usable preparation time are two different quantities, and the gap between them is usually much larger than people expect. A significant portion of that time will be absorbed by ordinary life continuing to happen: coursework, work deadlines, family obligations, illness, simple procrastination born of the fact that a scholarship deadline six months away does not feel urgent on any single given day. What remains, once all of that ordinary life is subtracted, is often a much smaller number than the original six months suggested.

There is also a specific trap in how scholarships tied to university admission work, one that caught my cousin in a slightly different way with her second missed opportunity. A scholarship’s own stated deadline can look comfortably distant, while the university admission it depends on, a separate process entirely, has already closed weeks or months earlier. The scholarship deadline was real and accurate. It was simply irrelevant, because the door behind it had already shut.

And there is the matter of how document requests behave, which almost nobody anticipates correctly the first time. A transcript request feels, intuitively, like something that should take a few days. In practice, it depends on a university registrar’s office, which may process requests only during certain windows, or which may be dealing with a backlog that has nothing to do with you. A reference letter feels like something a busy professor can turn around quickly, and sometimes they can, but sometimes they are travelling, or teaching an unusually demanding term, or simply prioritising other requests that arrived first. None of these delays are anyone’s fault. They are simply how institutions and busy people actually operate, and a search plan that does not account for them is building on an assumption that rarely survives contact with reality.

I remember asking her, once we realised the problem, why she had not requested the transcript earlier, simply as a precaution, before she had even finished deciding which scholarships to prioritise. She said it had not occurred to her, because in her mind the transcript was something you requested once you knew you needed it for something specific, not something you kept ready in advance. I think that instinct, reasonable as it sounds, is exactly backwards for anything with an unpredictable processing time attached to it.

The Requirements People Often Miss

Beyond timing specifically, a few other things tend to cause strong students to miss opportunities that were genuinely within reach.

Scholarships that live outside the well-worn search paths. A general search for “scholarships abroad” surfaces the same well-known, heavily advertised handful of programmes for almost everyone who tries it. Smaller, more specific opportunities- a departmental award, a regional foundation, a scholarship tied to a niche field- exist in large numbers but rarely appear in that same crowded first page of results. Students who search only in the most obvious places quietly limit themselves to competing for the most competitive, most visible fraction of what is actually available.

The habit of ruling yourself out before anyone else does. I have heard countless capable students describe a well-known, prestigious scholarship as “not really for someone like me,” based purely on its reputation, without ever reading its actual eligibility criteria. Sometimes that instinct is correct. Often, it is not, and the only way to know is to read the specific requirements rather than trust the general impression a scholarship’s fame creates.

Waiting for a version of yourself that does not yet exist. A student with a genuinely strong, eligible profile sometimes delays applying, hoping to strengthen it first: a slightly higher grade next term, one more certification, a little more experience. This can be a reasonable calculation in some cases. It becomes a costly one when the wait causes an entire application cycle to be missed for an improvement that, in hindsight, would not have changed the outcome.

Treating one search as the whole search. New scholarships are announced throughout the year, not all in one convenient moment. A single, thorough search session captures only what existed at that specific point in time, and treating it as complete, rather than as an ongoing habit, closes the door on everything announced afterward.

Mistaking a strong first impression of a scholarship for a confirmed understanding of it. A scholarship that looks, on first glance, slightly too demanding or slightly too competitive can be dismissed within seconds, long before its actual criteria have been read closely. This kind of snap judgement, made under the general time pressure of researching many options at once, discards opportunities that a slower, more careful read might have kept on the list.

A Different Way to Move Through the Same Months

Here is roughly what I would suggest my cousin do differently, if I could hand her this advice before that first spreadsheet evening rather than after.

Begin the unglamorous, slow-moving tasks immediately, before any single scholarship is chosen, not after. Request a copy of your transcript the same week you decide you are seriously considering studying abroad, regardless of which specific programme you eventually apply to. Ask two or three people, well in advance, whether they would be willing to act as a reference at some point in the coming months, giving them plenty of notice rather than a sudden, urgent request. Check the available dates for any required test, and book one, even a rough placeholder date, well before you think you will need it.

Let the research and comparison happen alongside this preparation, not before it. There is no real conflict between refining a shortlist and requesting a transcript in the same week; the two activities do not compete for the same kind of attention. The mistake is treating preparation as the second phase of a two-phase plan, when it actually belongs in the first phase, running in parallel with the research from the very beginning.

I would also suggest treating the first document request as a kind of starting gun for the whole process, a small, deliberate act that turns an abstract plan into something with real, if quiet, momentum behind it. It does not need to be dramatic. An email to a university registrar, sent on an ordinary Tuesday evening, is enough to begin.

Set a repeating reminder to search every few weeks again, rather than trusting a single thorough session to have found everything. Treat an early, discouraging search as incomplete information, not a final verdict on what exists.

And when you find yourself hesitating over whether you are ready enough, whether your profile is strong enough, whether this is really the right moment, ask a more specific question instead: do I meet the stated eligibility criteria, and is the deadline still genuinely reachable from here? If the answer to both is yes, let that be enough to start, rather than waiting for a feeling of complete readiness that, in my experience, rarely arrives before it is needed anyway.

Before and After: A More Organised Process

Picture my cousin’s search a second time, with the preparation moved earlier.

In the first version, the one that actually happened, weeks go into a beautiful, thorough spreadsheet, while the transcript sits unrequested and the references sit unasked, until a passing comment about a three-week processing time reveals, almost by accident, that the runway has already run out.

In the second version, the transcript request goes out in the very first week, before the spreadsheet is even half finished. A message goes to two potential referees early, giving them a full two months’ notice rather than two weeks. The spreadsheet still gets built, still gets refined, still brings real value in comparing and choosing between options. But it happens alongside the slower, institutional tasks rather than before them, and by the time a final decision is made about which scholarships to prioritise, the documents needed to actually apply are either ready or close to it.

I like imagining this second version partly because of how undramatic it is. Nothing about it requires more talent, more hours in the day, or a different personality. It requires only a slightly different order of operations, decided in advance, before the excitement of researching options has a chance to quietly crowd out the less exciting task of requesting a document.

The difference between these two versions is not effort, and it is certainly not ability; my cousin possesses more of both than most people I know. The difference is simply the order in which two different kinds of tasks were approached, and how early the slower, less controllable one was allowed to begin.

What to Take Forward

If there is one thing worth carrying from my cousin’s story, it is this: research feels like progress, and it is, but it is not the same thing as preparation, and only preparation has a clock attached to it that keeps running whether you are paying attention or not.

What should you do differently? The moment you seriously start considering scholarships abroad, before you have chosen any specific one, begin the slow tasks: request your transcript, identify possible referees, check test dates. Let your research and comparison continue in parallel, not beforehand.

What should you avoid? Avoid mistaking a well-organised research process for genuine progress toward a deadline. A beautiful spreadsheet and a requested transcript are both forms of work, but only one of them moves you closer to actually being able to submit an application when the moment arrives.

The practical principle worth keeping is simple: start the parts you cannot control earliest, and let the parts you can control- comparing, choosing, refining- happen alongside them rather than first. My cousin did apply the following year successfully, with her documents requested months ahead of any specific deadline. She still keeps a spreadsheet. She just no longer lets it be the only thing moving.

Next step

If you are beginning a scholarship search and want a structured way to build your preparation timeline before deadlines close in, this free guide is a useful place to start:

Before You Apply: A Decision Guide for Choosing Better-Fit International Scholarships.

It helps you check what matters early, while there is still time to act on it.

Why Do Students Miss Good Scholarship Opportunities? What Are They Overlooking? was originally published in Thoughts & Reflections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.