Be Not Proud
An LJ friend recently compiled a list of the various things he's been proud of doing or being a part of, and I thought it was a neat idea, so I tried doing one for myself. I had the interesting result of realizing, yet again, that I have a very hard time taking pride in my achievements, and that when I made my own list, I wasn't actually making a list of things I was proud of. I was making a list of things that looked like his list.
I'm still working out how and why I am the way I am. I think it comes down to a few things, though. The first of these is that, to me, taking pride in what I do is selfish and egotistical. At an emotional level, I seem to operate with the belief that I should take pride in my work but that I shouldn't feel pride about things I've done. They're done. If they were worth something to others, they'll show it. Meanwhile, I should be finding other challenges. At least, this seems to be a clear part of the pattern. This seems to especially show up when I had some other reason for doing something, such as when it was required of me to do.
The other reason is because I remember myself when I was 20. I was arrogant. I'd walk into job interviews and speak about the things I'd done like they mattered. They did matter to me. I'd give frank opinions about things, too. After I was rejected by a number of employers, I decided to try out a different performance. I downplayed my contributions to things. I acted like my projects hadn't mattered to me. I was deferent and compliant, offering little of myself and seeking to simply be a reflection of what the interviewer wanted from me. I got the first job I interviewed for after changing my ways. Between that and piles of projects that never materialized, I think I've taken it very much to heart that I have yet to do much worth being proud about.
Before anyone accuses me of being emo and sad, I'm not. I'm actually very content with my life, even if parts of it currently feel a bit off (like the status of my thesis). I've built myself a path to happiness that doesn't seem to include a lot of self-satisfaction in it, is all. I'm thinking about it now, however, because I think I could possibly have an even happier and healthier life if I learned how to take more pride in myself.
So, here's an interesting list of things that I don't feel any particular pride in, but that I think I should. In some cases, I include possible reasons I don't feel much pride about them.
High School Era:
So, I guess there you have it. Just some stuff to ponder, nothing more.
I'm still working out how and why I am the way I am. I think it comes down to a few things, though. The first of these is that, to me, taking pride in what I do is selfish and egotistical. At an emotional level, I seem to operate with the belief that I should take pride in my work but that I shouldn't feel pride about things I've done. They're done. If they were worth something to others, they'll show it. Meanwhile, I should be finding other challenges. At least, this seems to be a clear part of the pattern. This seems to especially show up when I had some other reason for doing something, such as when it was required of me to do.
The other reason is because I remember myself when I was 20. I was arrogant. I'd walk into job interviews and speak about the things I'd done like they mattered. They did matter to me. I'd give frank opinions about things, too. After I was rejected by a number of employers, I decided to try out a different performance. I downplayed my contributions to things. I acted like my projects hadn't mattered to me. I was deferent and compliant, offering little of myself and seeking to simply be a reflection of what the interviewer wanted from me. I got the first job I interviewed for after changing my ways. Between that and piles of projects that never materialized, I think I've taken it very much to heart that I have yet to do much worth being proud about.
Before anyone accuses me of being emo and sad, I'm not. I'm actually very content with my life, even if parts of it currently feel a bit off (like the status of my thesis). I've built myself a path to happiness that doesn't seem to include a lot of self-satisfaction in it, is all. I'm thinking about it now, however, because I think I could possibly have an even happier and healthier life if I learned how to take more pride in myself.
So, here's an interesting list of things that I don't feel any particular pride in, but that I think I should. In some cases, I include possible reasons I don't feel much pride about them.
High School Era:
- All-County Academic Team: Both of my varsity years, I made all-county in Academic team. In order to do this, I had to be in the top 12 personal best scores across the three county schools, inviting me to a 12 person battle royale, with the first six people to fill point quotas being sent to the statewide tournament held at Disney World. My junior year, after the expulsion of the three seniors from the team, my crippled team of two juniors and a sophomore (you can seat four players a time, and we only had 3) went on to take 5th in state. The final was on Sunshine Network and was seen around the state. Why I feel little pride in this: The biggest reason is because, in all honesty, I didn't feel like I ever trained or worked for it. My family watched Jeopardy and my parents made me a dilettante from an early age. I filled in as a natural "trivia garbage collector". In addition, that 5th place standing? My fault. We were in 2nd place, only a few questions shy of winning scholarships and climbing the tournament tree. I hosed a computers question...not because I didn't know the answer, but because I broke with competition protocol in my answer. It cost my team scholarships and opportunities.
- The 1997 Yearbook: I was copy editor that year, so every word in the yearbook was approved by me. I also came up with the yearbook theme-- "Because We Can". I also personally contributed significant amounts of material completely on my own, earning a number of photographic credits in addition to writing, and at times, this saved the book from near disaster. Why I feel little pride in this: We changed yearbook advisers that year, and the new adviser didn't understand what he was doing. In addition, he changed the entire process of producing the yearbook, robbing the editors and veterans of their ability to provide support. The yearbook my junior year took my nights and weekends because I loved it and believed in our adviser, staff, and ability. My senior year, it took my nighs and weekends because it was a harsh mistress. It nearly didn't get published, and the sales and distribution were so hosed that I had to sneak out the window of the yearbook room to go to class because the front door had a mob at it. Then, the football coach yelled at me for doing a bad job, despite the fact that the writer for those pages resigned the day the material was due. I was just happy to be done with it.
- UF SSTP: This was a program where high school students could live in the dorms and be research interns at University of Florida labs prior to their senior year of high school. I got to work in a robotics lab and worked on autonomous navigation for a robot designed to operate in harsh conditions. I was awarded a medal by the program for my presentation. Why I feel little pride in this: The honest truth is that my research was a joke and a sham. The robot never actually tried out the algorithm. The algorithm itself was just some law of cosines math to try and guess the gap between obstacles, and I knew it wasn't novel at the time. The simulator also never showed any sign that the robot could find the gap between the objects, and I never got time to create a proper test environment. It was some good looking slides depicting hollow efforts.
- Eagle Scout: I was in scouting since the age of 7, and I got my Eagle when I was 16. I learned a lot along the way, but it was a hollow victory in the end. Why: Because I hated my troop. 80% of the other boys were assholes who wasted my time and the troop's. I changes Scoutmasters twice while I was there, and I completed my Eagle just before my troop folded and was issued a new troop number. I also was pushed heavily by my father, who was a volunteer with the troop. I felt like I was mostly just finishing it to please him and because I was so close to being done. The whole thing was so pushed and such a lackluster thing to me that I requested to skip my formal Court of Honor ceremony, declining to have my moment in the local press or a ceremony celebrating my achievement. I told my parents that I didn't want another party to plan, nor did I want the attention, nor did I feel that honors and accolades were appropriate for that sort of thing. A year later, another scout from my troop got his Eagle and did the whole shebang. I attended it because Eagles always get invites as they're part of the ceremony. When I got to see what I'd missed, I regretted not at least having a moment to celebrate myself for holding to my duties.
- Swagger: This was my first major programming effort on my own. At the time, the Jabber instant messaging protocol was new, and a friend of a friend had been working on a parser library in Java. Nobody was writing client software with it, so I did. The result was Swagger, an ICQ-like Jabber client. I pulled a lot of all-nighters developing it, and for a while, I was actually pretty proud of it. What happened? There were a lot of features left undone, and as it was my first project, it needed a re-design to accommodate it. While I was thinking about where to go next, another developer filled the space, and I felt pretty irrelevant. I forget...he called it Shagger first, I think, then Shaolo. I attempted to jump back into the race with the next-generation Swagger, named CoffeeTalk, but it never made if off the launch pad.
- That's it for college. The rest was a blur of my work at a dotcom and doing my coursework, mixed somewhat with various psychedelics. I declined to attend my graduation, telling my parents there was no reason for us to celebrate my doing what they expected of me. I also tried to refuse their graduation gifts on similar grounds, but they insisted.
- Passing the Qualifier: The written qualifier is a massive test spanning two years of graduate-level material. It took a full semester for me to study for it, but damn it, I was ready. It was passing my qualifier that made me feel, for the first time, that I actually belonged on the path I was on. I guess I'm still proud of my mastery of the material, but the shine has faded off. Why? Because waiting on the other side has been a nauseating quagmire of unclear paths on how to actually advance to candidacy and defend. I'm still pleased, however, to know that it's not because I don't know my stuff.
- Being a TA: I think I might be the only person who ever wanted to be, and liked, being a TA. I was teaching operating systems, a field in which I hoped to make a valid research contribution (silly, naive me), and I had a ton of face time with my students. They appreciated how much effort I took to teach them, and I appreciated the opportunity to really learn the material through having to explain it simply. I work with a former student of mine. Having had the opportunity to give the "aha moment" to a few dozen people is one of the moments in my life that I can truly say I'm proud of.
- Implementing a compiler...Implementing a DBMS: You can find a bunch of these massive projects in my past. Every one of them was a hard, hurried slog designed to pass the grader's test and not much more. Coding to a test is hardly worth being proud of.
- Google Internship: Between a friend helping me completely rewrite my resume and having some extra experience, I had a handful of internship offers on the table that summer, but the Google one was 11-th hour and promised to offer me a chance to work on Jabber (now called XMPP) in a professional context. I certainly felt like belle of the ball when I had competing offers to consider, which went away when I picked Google. I'd lie if I said I was proud of that Google internship, though. How'd that happen? Basically, everyone in the Google office was an asshole to me, made me feel incompetent, and refused to actually give me help or advice, even though I couldn't even get access to basic manuals for Google's systems. Working crippled, I couldn't run with the big dogs, and they thus treated me like I wasn't worth their time. It basically dashed the hopes I had of working for a major tech player and the hopes I had of returning to Seattle any time soon. If you ever see me talking about how I worked at Google, you can know that I'm doing it because other people think it's impressive, not because I'm proud of it.
- Publication in XML Journal and Java Developer's Journal: My first job out of school wasn't very stimulating, so I did some various bits of moonlighting on the side. On a lark, and imitating a former boss of mine, I decided to pitch an article to XML Journal on Jabber, and they bit. It was fun, and for a while, I was very, very proud of myself. My parents even framed it as a gift for my birthday, and I keep it on the wall. I keep it to remind myself of the day I realized I could reach a world beyond the job I was at. A couple months later, I wrote an article on using native code extensions to the JVM to closely control its operations. After a few months, though, I'd somewhat forgotten about the articles entirely. Why the pride dried up: Basically, outside of my parents, I'm not sure that anyone read the articles at all. My boss treated my efforts as irrelevant and, in general, nobody really cared unless they already knew me and cared.
- Jabberbots: During a period of unemployment, I was working on something as an adjunct to Swagger. It was called Jabberbots, and it was a framework for developing and deploying automated services that could interact via IM. I envisioned it as an engine for enabling IT and customer service infrastructures, and then I quickly started to realize that I could also use them to enable distributed and peer-to-peer computing services. I began creating methods for discovery of services, producing service directories, remote procedure calls, and even envisioned a simple scripting language to allow someone to string together a P2P service from existing bots. Its programming interface was quite simple but flexible, and I was very pleased with his potential. But then reality sunk in: I failed to attract even one customer, and as my first job began to ramp up, my development time began to wane. In short order, I discovered XML-RPC, UDDI, and SOAP, and I realized I'd been reinventing the wheel over a protocol that was still going unadopted. I put Jabberbots out to pasture, where it got a nibble or two from researchers and some IT guys.
- The FCCI-JBoss Media Blitz: I was out to kill two birds with one stone. I needed to defend my Java development to my director, and I needed to boost my level of prestige in the workplace. I did this by making a lot of talk on the JBoss forums until my company was seen as a model of the companies JBoss was after. We began a media campaign to that end, and my name was in the IT press a few times as a result. I'd have been really proud of myself if it weren't for the fact that it was basically a ploy to get me a promotion to the level I believed I deserved.
- Motorola Q9h: I was a major contributor to the operating system of that phone. In fact, my name is on the patent submission for some very special intellectual property in that phone. I learned a hell of a lot, and gave a hell of a lot, and I even achieved my childhood dream of "making a computer go". And yet...nobody buys it. So, while I'm proud of what I did, I basically contributed to a product that collects dust on storeroom shelves. The amount of burnout and sacrifice I've given to the project has seriously buffed the shine off of it. Now, whenever I hear about a new issue on our re-release of the software, I just groan and pray it doesn't involve me.
- Freetime and Greentime: The twin mistresses of disappointment. In both cases, I basically bit off way, way, way more than I could chew. I was smitten with what I saw as the democracy of the blogging and video blogging world and decided I, too, could make a successful blog. All I had to do was get started. Internet video is, by its nature, cheaply and hastily produced and silly, so I figured I'd just sling out strange and random stuff and see what stuck. It was even more emboldening when our documentary on the Florida Gay Rodeo Association's Sunshine Stampede won an award. I'm actually very proud of that documentary and that award, but I'd had expectations that I'd end up drawing an audience to Freetime that simply never appeared. Greentime was an attempt to try a new tack, being less "show" and more "blog", and it seemed for a while like our initial base of commenters was good, but it, too, has shown a lot of weakness. In both cases, the labor versus the self satisfaction has really made them less desirable to do. In addition, I reached too high with that documentary, thinking the Vloggy would be a sign it could do well elsewhere, but it got turned down for festival showings and I had to "learn my place". Note, however, that I didn't say I'm not proud of my video work. I'm proud of the documentary, of a project called Virtual Mitch 3000, and of a DVD I'm about to release for the roller derby grrls.
- Cycling and Running: Believe it or not, I'm insanely proud of myself here, even if my training is lagging and my results are not the least bit competitive. My standards are just that low. Just getting out and doing 60 miles on my bike or a 33:00 5k feels like something special to me, because I'd already decided long ago I couldn't do these things at all. I am proud of myself every time I work out.
- My wife: This is something in my life I'm insanely proud of-- having not screwed up things with nancyblue. She's the only girlfriend I've had who was good to me and good for me, and I'm glad I married her. In fact, most of the things I've done since the age of 22 couldn't have been done without her, even if my pride in them has been very short lived. At the same time, though, I have a hard time calling it "pride", because that just sounds selfish. I shouldn't be self-satisfied over something like that.
So, I guess there you have it. Just some stuff to ponder, nothing more.