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May 10th, 2020

Rather than writing a rant, an opinion, or a joke, I felt the need to write about what I have been doing, what I have been thinking, and what I will doing. Note: After writing, I realized my natural writing style is semi rant-y. Please excuse this fact.

I haven’t done much recently. In fact, I don’t think I have done much for the last two years (at least not productively). I have met and made great new friends, read or listened to great books, and survived life so far. Yet, I see colleagues that I thought I was ahead of getting ahead of me achieving goals that I wanted to achieve myself. Being completely honest to myself and a few of whom may be reading this, I know the reason. I didn’t channel my focus (time) in the right direction. Excusing the unfortunate situation with my eyesight resulting in being unable to accept a 2020 Summer position, I spent the majority of my mental energy on meaningless noises. This is how I spent my time: Youtube, League of Legends, Netflix, Twitch, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, and sleeping 12+ hours. I am not trying to frown on these things but rather the excess of which inhibited my ability to achieve more important things. While writing this, I wonder “What’s more important anyway?”. If you know of the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment by Mischel, you will know the difference between instant gratification and delayed gratification. The experiment goes to correlate those who achieve delayed gratifications to be able to achieve societally ideal goals such as high academic grades, higher salaries, etc. It’s a very interesting study perhaps explaining its popularity. The point is that I defend instant gratification in some sense. In fact, I wrote a short paper discussing the shortcomings of the experiment and the failure to consider for the time discounted value and risk associated with the second marshmallow. The paper itself isn’t that important but rather I talked about it explain that I am an instant gratification type. I hate having to wait for things. I also get bored of things very easily. Hence, I abuse the aforementioned “noises” to numb my brain from boredom. I think they worked to keep me off being bored for a while. At some point, I stopped caring about long term goals and kept my brain busy with these noises. This probably occurred when I was on my first job thinking I have achieved what I wanted from high school days. After which I had no next step. I am wondering about with no direction like a floating jellyfish. Yet, time ticks. Other people who continued to work their asses off got their rewards, yet I am stuck with no change. I thought it would be an easy stride once I realized this at the end of last year. It wasn’t. It was hard to find the momentum I needed especially when I was moving in the wrong direction distracted by noises. To be honest, I thought I was making strides for the last couple of months not realizing the noises that still surround me. In fact, I almost failed a course. Never in a thousand years would I have thought that I would fail a course. I’ve always said, “School is school.” – indicating that school is merely a requirement and shouldn’t be the focus unless you need/want to. Yet here I was scared about actually failing a course. I originally thought that I failed the course when I calculated the final grade using the existing grades. I messaged few friends about what I should do about the seemly inevitable upcoming future. Here I thought: I fucked up. I could give a million excuses starting from my eyesight issue to some ridiculous reasons involving COVID-19, but I knew those weren’t it. It was due to my work ethic or rather the lack thereof. Funnily enough, I already gave up this particular course and I shifted my gear to focus on another course thinking I can’t fail this other one too. When my ass was on fire, I worked. I, for the first time in sixteen years in education, studied for a single exam for two weeks. I managed to get a 100 in that final (Still mediocre final grade due to terrible midterm). Here I was sitting looking at the irony of it all; Managing to achieve my university academic best and worst in the same term. Luckily by sheer chance, I managed to avoid the worst outcome and passed the original course due to the wrongly graded assignment being fixed by the course admin without my knowledge.

Lesson learned. Be lucky and all problems are solved. :smile:

Joking aside, building a proper work ethic won’t happen overnight. I understand that just starting the race when others already sprinted off. I won’t be able to cut out the noises overnight either. It will take time and effort. It won’t be that I will be completely cutting myself from social media and alike but rather to moderate myself. Here goes nothing! :tada: