So this is a bit of a ragey post...
I know it's been a while since I posted on here (or even looked on here, come to think of it), but I was moved to write something, and I didn't want to sign up for Posterous.
I was listening to a video by Sean Plott earlier, Day[9] to those that know his handle, and he told a story about motivation that I've heard before. It's the one that Will Smith apparently told about his father making him build a wall. Here's a link that's related to it...
http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-1488/Will-Smith-on-Building-a-Wall.html
The upshot is, all you have to do is work hard and you can do anything you want.
Which makes it sound so simple. So very....fucking...simple.
The problem is that I have no idea what I want. I've had ideas in the past, and I've tried to do stuff, and it hasn't worked. And this includes me spending quite a lot of time on them.
Let me give you an example. I like Starcraft 2. I really do. I think it's a great game. I spent a lot of time on it. For those that count that sort of thing, I have replays from roughly seven hundred games.
And to begin with, I sucked. Really badly. Which is OK, cos you do when you start new things. So I worked at it. I watched videos and tried to learn. And got my ass kicked. So I tried more videos and builds and got my ass kicked. Then came FilterSC and his videos which made a difference. And for a little while, I was good.
And then I got my ass kicked 10 times in a row.
So I asked for help and was told that I needed to work on my mechanics. So I did. And got my ass kicked again. And again.
I've mostly given up now. It's no longer something I relish, and I have serious ladder anxiety to the point that I'm making up excuses to *not* play this game.
For a while I wondered about being a pro gamer, but this is clearly never going to happen.
And that, right there, is the closest I've come to having a wall to build.
Or here's another example. I've had several jobs in my time that I started out at the bottom of the organisation. Good example, Sainsburys. I worked hard, and was on time. I did overtime and didn't gripe. I covered shifts and didn't whine. And at the end of the day, where did it get me? In a piece of shit, dead end job with no prospects at all. So basically nowhere.
Which is the beginning of the death spiral for that job because I got demotivated after a while, and then I lost the job after nearly 2 years. Which really doesn't help.
The only tech support job I've ever hard, I managed to get depressed and then make a mistake that caused a lot of problems. I was basically given my marching orders at that point. And this was a job that I was good at. And I'd worked hard at. And I'd liked for a long time.
But I wasn't getting anywhere. And I wasn't worth funding through a cisco course. This was originally presented as a budgetary concern, but it turns out that a guy who joined later who wasn't even full time tech support *was* worth paying for.
And I just...lost my edge. So I lost that job, and spent a long time unemployed.
And so far, in terms of jobs and career plans and life plans, I have no idea. So I'm floating along being unhappy about my lack of progress, but foiled by the fact that I don't know what I want, and the only times I've had an idea, and tried for that idea, I've failed so hard that I don't care about those things anymore. And the problem with that is it discourages you from starting new things because "I worked hard at things I thought I was good at, and all I got was this lousy depression."
So when I hear people spouting this bullshit about all you need is hard work, it makes me so angry. You don't just need hard work. You need a plan. You need a destination. And you need some kind of hint that all the shit that you're going to have to go through is going actually be worth it.
And I know it may seem like I'm being down on hard work. That's not true. Hard work is part of any successful plan. But it's only part of the plan, not the whole thing.
So yeah. This has been an angry ramble, but I couldn't sleep until I'd written it. It may also not be true, and there may be vast holes in my logic.
In which case, please do let me know. Hopefully I can be in a more positive frame of mind if/when people do...
I was listening to a video by Sean Plott earlier, Day[9] to those that know his handle, and he told a story about motivation that I've heard before. It's the one that Will Smith apparently told about his father making him build a wall. Here's a link that's related to it...
http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-1488/Will-Smith-on-Building-a-Wall.html
The upshot is, all you have to do is work hard and you can do anything you want.
Which makes it sound so simple. So very....fucking...simple.
The problem is that I have no idea what I want. I've had ideas in the past, and I've tried to do stuff, and it hasn't worked. And this includes me spending quite a lot of time on them.
Let me give you an example. I like Starcraft 2. I really do. I think it's a great game. I spent a lot of time on it. For those that count that sort of thing, I have replays from roughly seven hundred games.
And to begin with, I sucked. Really badly. Which is OK, cos you do when you start new things. So I worked at it. I watched videos and tried to learn. And got my ass kicked. So I tried more videos and builds and got my ass kicked. Then came FilterSC and his videos which made a difference. And for a little while, I was good.
And then I got my ass kicked 10 times in a row.
So I asked for help and was told that I needed to work on my mechanics. So I did. And got my ass kicked again. And again.
I've mostly given up now. It's no longer something I relish, and I have serious ladder anxiety to the point that I'm making up excuses to *not* play this game.
For a while I wondered about being a pro gamer, but this is clearly never going to happen.
And that, right there, is the closest I've come to having a wall to build.
Or here's another example. I've had several jobs in my time that I started out at the bottom of the organisation. Good example, Sainsburys. I worked hard, and was on time. I did overtime and didn't gripe. I covered shifts and didn't whine. And at the end of the day, where did it get me? In a piece of shit, dead end job with no prospects at all. So basically nowhere.
Which is the beginning of the death spiral for that job because I got demotivated after a while, and then I lost the job after nearly 2 years. Which really doesn't help.
The only tech support job I've ever hard, I managed to get depressed and then make a mistake that caused a lot of problems. I was basically given my marching orders at that point. And this was a job that I was good at. And I'd worked hard at. And I'd liked for a long time.
But I wasn't getting anywhere. And I wasn't worth funding through a cisco course. This was originally presented as a budgetary concern, but it turns out that a guy who joined later who wasn't even full time tech support *was* worth paying for.
And I just...lost my edge. So I lost that job, and spent a long time unemployed.
And so far, in terms of jobs and career plans and life plans, I have no idea. So I'm floating along being unhappy about my lack of progress, but foiled by the fact that I don't know what I want, and the only times I've had an idea, and tried for that idea, I've failed so hard that I don't care about those things anymore. And the problem with that is it discourages you from starting new things because "I worked hard at things I thought I was good at, and all I got was this lousy depression."
So when I hear people spouting this bullshit about all you need is hard work, it makes me so angry. You don't just need hard work. You need a plan. You need a destination. And you need some kind of hint that all the shit that you're going to have to go through is going actually be worth it.
And I know it may seem like I'm being down on hard work. That's not true. Hard work is part of any successful plan. But it's only part of the plan, not the whole thing.
So yeah. This has been an angry ramble, but I couldn't sleep until I'd written it. It may also not be true, and there may be vast holes in my logic.
In which case, please do let me know. Hopefully I can be in a more positive frame of mind if/when people do...