Learning to Recognize Success

It’s probably harder than most people realize to recognize success.  I mean, here’s the president trying to push for success in Afghanistan and there’s always scientists trying to push for success in testing new drugs and therapy methods.  You’ve become an adult when you realize that success isn’t the same thing as winning or perfection.

I find my job incredibly hard because I find it equally hard to recognize success or change.  So many of the “life skills” that my cognitively disabled clients need to learn can only be taught through difficult situations.  No doubt it’s the same with anyone learning these “life skills” like communication, and patience, breathing deeply, accepting limitation, and waiting.  However I feel as though (in the words of my coworker) we’ve all ‘won a trip on a luxury cruise’ but now we’re here waiting for things to ‘go wrong’ so we can then show how to fix them when the same things go wrong again in the future.

Because trust me, they will.

Deadlines get pushed back, construction projects always run over budget, trash cans always overflow, dishes inevitably pile up.  Success in these situations is hard to notice, harder still to acknowledge and accept. Behind each of these irritating occurrences are the people who want to be praised for the start, or the final finish of the project, even when it didn’t follow the agreed upon schedule.

What can you do?  What can you do when you’re the person behind?

Answers?  Alternatively: I suppose acceptance, grace, accountability, punishment, thanks, mentors.

Which one in which circumstance?  It varies.

That’s something else to puzzle out throughout adulthood.  Because I hardly ever have the right answer right now.  My quick answer is usually condemnation, but I’m realizing more and more that these standards are a little unrealistic and likely to garner no friends.

Beneficial lies and Non-Beneficial lies

There are a whole lot of lies I tell myself.  You probably have yours too.

Mine are lies that mediate between what I know is best, and what I want to do at the moment.  They are lies that depress my scrupulous perfectionist streak, and they are lies that soothe my sense of immediacy.

I have lied to myself for a long time  saying “everything will get done eventually.”  That in some distant time I will have the ability to combine every hobby of mine with a job and social life.  And keep a clean house, garden and manicured nails.

That lie soothed my frustration when I wasn’t able to make a lunch for work the night before, and when I couldn’t mop the floor of my classroom everyday, and when the brilliant essay I wanted to write about my experiences playing intercultural soccer still languished in my brain.

I don’t think that lie is one of the beneficial ones I tell myself anymore.  I think that lie is harming me.  It’s distracting me from the perfection of when I DO manage to study 2.5 hours straight, and when I do manage to read three or four articles about A Science Discovery.  Because that lie has told me I can just make unlimited stores of “you should, could and will do x,y,z things that you NEED to do.”  That lie hasn’t pardoned the relentless sprint of time; that lie has pushed me to run with time on my heels always nipping my ankles with passed deadlines.  I’m living with the past and future taking chunks out of my brain.

Chances are, I won’t do everything.  At the very least I won’t do it all, not with the frequency, and regularity that that sentence has made me think.  So it’s time to search for a new sentence.

Biased Recommendations

When I talk with numerous people in my various social circles I repeat the same stories ad nauseum.  They aren’t nauseated though, I am.  However, it does become easier to pick out trends in my own life of which I may have been unaware.

One of those trends, which I think can be generalized to a great many other people, is the tendency to recommend as universally good the experiences I have had which have produced superior enjoyment or learning.  Most notable would be drinking coffee.

Drinking coffee has never let me down.  Not drinking coffee may produce a headache or drowsiness, but drinking coffee produces verbosity, mental connection, smiling, and relief of stress.  Because of this experience with coffee (and especially Dunkin Donuts pumpkin spice coffee with lots of cream) I wholeheartedly recommend and endorse drinking coffee.  And Dunkin Donuts.

I also endorse reading, traveling, libraries, indie music, Jesus, the fall foliage, biking to work, Salem, letter writing and being a vegetarian.  Now that I’ve identified these things in my life as pleasure-full I am more likely to read legitimate scientific studies about them.  Once I have read these studies I am more likely to talk about them.  The more I read them, the more convinced I am that I have found the perfect hobbies and quirks.

The things is, I don’t spend any time reading any studies or discussing when these interests may have been bad for me or others.  I also don’t spend any time searching out new information regarding activities that are completely outside my realm of interest.  Fishing may be beneficial, but I don’t spend any time doing it, so I don’t spend any time reading or talking about it, so I don’t spend any time recommending it.  It’s almost the equivalent of dismissing and degrading it.  It’s also less likely that I will recognize it as an appropriate or useful way to spend time.

We recommend what we like, and since we can only like so many things with our small capacity of time and energy to experience them we get prejudiced quickly and entrenched firmly.

One other conclusion I can draw from this is that maybe this is why adults seems so boring to adolescents.  The adolescent is still experiencing so many new things, things that won’t be new after a while, things that will eventually get pruned out of their lives in favor of the most enjoyable things.  The adult recommends what they know is enjoyable, but the adolescent wants to try many more things that could be enjoyable, but they aren’t sure yet.

Generalists vs Specialists

I was sitting down in the dark with three unlikely people.  Four, if you count the kid among us who was tugging his dad’s sleeve asking “when can we go… what time is it?”

Myself, nice middle class white American.  Alban, Albanian immigrant college student and general smartass.  Hiller, Ugandan immigrant soccer coach and student.  Gabe (and his son), Hondurian and it turns out I don’t know what he does as work.

We were sitting there because we unlikely birds have managed to find ourselves with no other friends on a Wednesday and an unusual hankering to play soccer.  “Where are you friends” I asked Gabe, and he pointed to Hiller, Alban and myself, then tapped his chest.  Here you are are.  Here I am.

And so we had played 2v2, a poor option but better than nothing, and were then sitting down, doing nothing.  Nothing but discussing a very convoluted and confusing topic.

Is it better to be the best scorer and become famous for it leading yourself and your team to glory, or is it better to be “good at everything?”  Is “good at everything” a catch all phrase meaning “not very good” at scoring, a “fill-in” as they say.

This hinges on an earlier soccer debate this year.  Is there such a thing as dominating?  If you have fabulous team cameraderie, and wondering passing, but poor scoring can you be outplayed by an inferiorly picked team with better scorers?  By a simple number you will clearly be “losing.”  Does that mean you are “worse.”   It’s hard to say.

The person who is scoring has been set up, by those possessing talent to create opportunities, assists they call it, but that person receives little credit.  The person who assisted the assister receives none.

Should you then be the generalist, the person who must manage the rest of the team, or should you hone those skills specifically that lead you to stand out.

In life it seems that the specialists is certainly the one that makes the money taking an illustration from the health care field.  The surgeon, whether it be brain or cosmetic is the one that makes the money.  The general practitioner is the one that lives in anonymity merely continuing to promote the good health of those around him.  How do we give credit to both?  Should we?

If some people in the benefit of the good of all give up their own hope for fame or greater fortune should there be a reward?  Is there anyway to smooth out the differences in these relationships or must there always be a tug of competition in complicated societies like this.

Seeing as my own path of life has created me to be a generalist rather than a specialist I am prejudiced on that side.  I see the role that I play in life, one of connection, as a way of mediating different social circles.  I don’t play soccer fabulously, I am not knowledgeble about particular branches of literature, psychology, theology, philosopy, health or nutrition, I can’t wax rhapsodic about the latest indie rock bands. But I know the people who can do those things, and I can connect you to them.  I am a generalist.  I know enough of some things to allow me to do more things.  I work fairly hard, but not too hard, in order to avoid classification.

At times this leads to yearning for a niche, but at times it creates a world of rich interdiscipline.

I know I know

We live in a country of excess.  Yet, even though my closet is full of clothes, I often find myself staring, like everyone else, into the closet and finding nothing to wear and nothing to keep me warm as the temperature dips below freezing this weekend.

I had fantasized about going a whole year without buying clothes, and even made it a grand total of 5 weeks.  But yesterday I bought a Mr. Rodgers-esque sweater and wore it all evening; it’s lambswool warmth cutting the edge off of the 55 degrees we’re keeping our house at apparently.

How did I make it through last winter with the sweaters I’ve got?  Not stylishly, that’s for sure.  I’m certain I will follow in that trend this winter too.

Once I confessed that I can’t find a style to call my own, and a coworker asked if I was the oldest child in my family.  She nodded knowingly, as people are wont to do when their guesses or personal hypotheses are proved right.  She never did tell me what I had proved for her, but I have spent a great deal of time pursing possible answers to her question.

Metacognition

I first began this adult phase when I discovered, or perhaps appropriated, the verb “embrace” approximately midway through the year.  It applies to a whole host of things that I can try to chip away at, but for the most part can’t change.  For example, it is becoming cold out, last night was the first frost.  In this case, it would be wise to “embrace” winter.  It’s coming whether I am ready for it or not.  To this end, another wise move would be to buy a sweater, or many sweaters.  A butter colored sweater is now on me.

Another example of this huggable state of life is my realization and acceptance of my introverted nature.  Try as I might, I find that life functions better when I have periods of solitude interspersed with wild parties and dancing rather than vice verse.

Finally, what prompted this new blog is the discovery of metacognition.  I suppose if you had asked me if I previously knew it, I would have replied yes, after you explained it to me in painstaking detail.  However, now that I understand the idea and use of it, I would like to try and incorporate it into my slowly changing life.  After all, Adults change too, they just do it a lot more imperceptibly than Children.

I began to discover it earlier this year, in March when I was prompted by a self-help book, to keep a journal on all of my eating and the reasons why I eat.  I lasted about three weeks of doing this before I decided that ignorance was bliss.  That exercise was the last link in a long chain of steps toward discovering metacognition however.

I am an adult now, and as such I believe I have an obligation to recognize that I have foibles.  That I do not have the only way of solving a problem firmly in hand, and that I can and do get on other people’s nerves.

That said, today I realized that I operate under the assumption that “Life is short, Eat dessert first.”  I do, and many times I eat that dessert early and often.  Literally, as in the case of brownies today at work, and figuratively, as spending twenty minutes earlier in the fluffy confection that is facebook rather than serious study.

The problem with this is twofold.  The body (and mind) doesn’t run very well on dessert all the time for one thing.  Fatigue is rampant and irritability surprisingly common.  The other is that when you eat dessert first, there is nothing to look forward to but the ruined taste of succulent spinach and crunchy walnuts.  The sugar and sweets have corrupted your taste buds for what is a better meal, leaving you the poorer and more dissatisfied.

Thus, today having realized this, I will attempt to put my dinner back before my dessert.