Dropped Ball: Goal states
In the Philosphy post, there was one element in the nut graf that never got picked back up again.
Excerpted, it read: "My viewpoint on my life as of late is that I’m learning how to … overcome a lot of how I grew up and managed my education and work lives
up until now…"
So, worth delving into that for the sake of clarity.
Basically, I was a smart student that got lost in the system. Somehow I never got into the advanced classes that I should have. My mother often recalls me coming home from school crying because the teacher would keep saying the same thing over and over and over and the class just couldn’t get it already. I would let it bother me to the point of it working me up for the day.
At a certain point, I checked out. I never left school, but I stopped learning for the most part. It is where I began to question the value of how things were being done. In sixth grade, we had to memorize the opening stanza of a poem:
The breaking waves dashed high on a stern and rockbound coast,
And the woods against the stormy sky their giant branches tossed.
Aside from a few words, I still remember it today (which is why Google helped me find it). But it lacks context, it is just a bunch of words to me, as it was then. Poetry isn’t a place for rote memorization being passed off as education.
Somehow, then or later, I did develop an appreciation for the romantics (Shelley, Keats, and whatever third Romantic poet is always lumped in with them), but for the most part, I stopped playing along at school whenever I didn’t think there was value in what we were doing, which was often.
In one high school class, we had to learn a long passage from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and one after another, students would go to the front of the room and repeat the same passage for an entire class, if not more.
"I have always thought of Christmas
time, when it has come round — apart from the
veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything
belonging to it can be apart from that — as a
good time…"
Each student walking to the front of the room, with no papers, none of them giving anything more than a perfunctory monotone reading and getting credit for the assignment.
"…a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant
time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar
of the year, when men and women seem by one consent
to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think
of people below them as if they really were
fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race
of creatures bound on other journeys."
But, when it came to be my turn, I froze. I’m not sure why. I had studied the piece, but when I stood in front of the room my mind was a complete blank.
"And therefore,
uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or
silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me
good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"
It’s difficult to say if I just got a case of nerves, or what, as ten seconds later I knew the whole thing in my seat. I think I was the only person in the class to not complete the assignment. But on some level, I knew it was a pointless exercise.
I had checked out of school long before that, so some of my friends ended up in advanced english classes and our lunches would be spent with them singing musical versions of Poe that were played in the class, talking about stuff that sounded better than my English studies. Now, truth be told, there’s a good chance that class wouldn’t have done much for me either, but the grass is always greener.
I always did enough work to get by. I never tended to fail out of anything, but I was more likely to get Cs across the board. If I connected with a teacher, I would get As, but the onus was always on them.
Looking back, I see that as the beginning of a pattern that has gone on for a long time. Because checking out of high school sort of removed the possibility of going to a bigger school for college. Cost alone was a factor in college, too, but my grades had definitely played a role.
Once I was in college, though, I was still a bit meandering. I would keep switching schools and majors, thinking I was making a critical decision, not knowing that a lot of people end up in jobs that have absolutely nothing to do with their field of study. One economics teacher in community college said he never took attendance and if anyone thought they could do it, he wrote down the two days during the semester when the tests would be given. He said no one that had tried in the past to only show up for the tests had passed, but that didn’t dissuade me. I only showed up for the tests, and passed. My guess is that the following semester, he revised history again and said no one had ever passed that way.
But that became the pattern: what is the minimum amount of work I can do and pull things off. Not going to a school that challenged me coupled with my apathy made me never learn how to work on long-term projects efficiently, stay up all night to hit a deadline, etc.
My experience was to procrastinate, then work feverishly, and to spend the downtime in the middle thinking that I should be working.
That followed me into the workplace, although I didn’t realize it initially. Out of school, I ended up as a reporter at the daily newspaper, but there was never any room for procrastination there. You went to an event, came back, wrote it up, and that was it. There was no time between the event and the story. As I got promoted, ending up covering the entire county courthouse on a daily basis, I would often have 3-4 stories to write a day including murder trials, civil action filings, progress in upcoming trials based on paperwork filed that day, etc.
Once I got into a more relaxed workplace, though, it was hard to stay focused. And long-term projects were never really managed appropriately. It was mainly wait, wait, wait… oh no, hurry, hurry, hurry! All of which is also coupled with what I learned to think in grade school: is this really useful? Do I care about this?
It’s not a good combination.
Even when I’ve been working on the novel and unemployed, whenever I’d do some contract work some of those issues still appeared. Very often, the deadline was immediate, so that would get handled fine. But if I had four days to do something, something might happen on day three, but most of it would be as late as possible on day four. But, and here’s the important thing, I would kill all four days in the pursuit of doing it. It would constantly dog me. But it would be, I’m going to go to the gym then work on that assignment… OK, as soon as I take my bath, then it’s the assignment. After I watch the Colbert Report while I eat lunch, then it’s the assignment.
Only one assignment during this time got me all fired up, where I couldn’t wait to get the project rolling and saw it as a great opportunity. That one, of course, fizzled out. But it was a project where I totally believed in the goals of the site, it is something I’d used myself, I believed in it implicitly.
Even with the novel, there would be no way for me to have a 700+ page draft of the novel without a huge level of commitment.
So, somewhere along the way, I never learned how to do things that you have to do, whether you want to or not. And, a lot of these jobs are for a huge hourly rate, so there is really no need for reluctance at all.
Now, I realize that learning how things got to be the way they are today is not an excuse. so, I can question my teachers, why I gave up on education, would I have had to learn to manage my time and commit more at a bigger, better school… but that’s all useless, since the past happened.
I just think you need to explore the cause to know how to fix it.
Superficially, I have fixed it as far as contract jobs. I just do them immediately. I ignore whatever deadline I’m given and do it immediately, because giving me five days is just too much procrastination room, so I’ll opt to goof off, while berating myself about not doing the work, and then finish it frantically at 3 a.m. the morning before it’s due.
So, the workaround there is to jump on things like they are all on a tight deadline. It isn’t a fix, but it’s a decent patch.
Of course, the real key here is that this issue doesn’t exist when I do work I’m passionate about, so… maybe the goal isn’t to fix it, but find something that makes me want to fire on all cylinders, all the time.
