I’ve whined an aweful lot on this blog about time, probably as a result of suffering a year and a half of Michigan Engineering where every microsecond of every day counts (only slight exaggeration). I’ve stated before that I subscribe to the belief that time is your true wealth. The psychology of how we perceive time is interesting, and I had a breakthrough or two recently.
I was, ironically enough, sitting around playing Tetris on Monday night when I had this feeling of frustration wash over. I went out for a walk, which is my way of telling my subconscious: talk to me! It had some interesting things to say to me which changed how I view my time and my expectations. Four main points:
1. Time’s not scarce
2. You don’t have to do anything
3. When you remove all expectations, predictions and pressure, you multiply your capabilities
4. There’s nobody you need to justify yourself to
Let me explain.
First point. My world, like most Americans, is dominated by a sense of urgency. Stuff has to get done, in a certain order, as quick as possible. This is true in day to day routine as well as year to year. ‘Time’s not scarce’ refers to the big picture. The next couple of years for me look like this: Get through school, get internships and experience, pay down your debts, find a real job, get a life. The pressure I’m feeling to chew through all of this has been getting to me while I’m stuck here. But – here’s the interesting part. I know full well that there’s a lot of very worthwhile activities I could and should be doing with my time while I’m here. For the most part, I haven’t been doing them. I realized that my mind prioritizes blasting through schoolwork and the rest of the gig above pretty much all else. I haven’t gotten around to working on my projects because my internal checklist says ‘you still have to do school first, and you’re not’.
When I pretend that university life doesn’t exist; I’m coming home to nothing, no plan… I suddenly feel great about my time here. I immediately think of all the things that I could be doing, and actually want to do them rather than saying ‘I should.’ The anxiety just goes away.
The second point complements perfectly. I realized how much anxiety builds up in my mind about the things I SHOULD be doing with my time and my life. All the advice I’ve ever gotten from people and all the things I tell myself I should be doing build up into this great wall of anxiety. Take them all away, and I realize very clearly the things I WANT to be doing instead. Again, I’m not talking small picture like ‘I should be doing homework, but I want to go have fun’. Much bigger than that. We all say that we are in control of our lives, but most people still end up doing things with it they don’t really want to do. They do things that the ‘should’ do instead.
When I think about that, I realize that I want to do engineering. I’m studying engineering not because I should, but because I want to. I don’t think I’ve ever said it that outright and explicitly to myself before. It’s an empowering idea and it relieves a lot of anxiety. It’s not that I should be an engineer because I’m good at math and science and I like the challenges. It’s that I simply want to do it.
I also let myself say that I want to be an entrepreneur. I’ve been saying to myself that I should be an entrepreneur given the challenges and benefits and lifestyle and the fact that it gets me all kinds of excited. Instead of telling myself that, I just let myself gravitate towards it and realize that it’s something I want to do. Fortunately, I can work on that while I’m here. And when I temporarily de-prioritize engineering and school, I do it.
Moving on to the third point, which builds on the first two. I use a lot of shoulds when I prepare for a challenge. I build an expectation of results that, given my personality, tends to be really high. This is my old inhereted perfectionism illness. That, unfortunately, leads me to avoid things where I’m scared I won’t clear the bar. But more than that, it leads to significantly worse performance. It’s like playing goalie – if you expect perfection, you’re going to be a terrible goalie. I learned to deal with my perfectionism in sports, and I need to transfer that to other areas of interest as well, like speaking Spanish for example. I often won’t speak in class because I don’t want to sound like a gringo, and that’s detrimental. It’s probably no coincidence that my favorite class is the one where I’m forced to speak up anyways – Oral Expression. Practicing how to shut up perfectionism might be the most important thing I ever get out of playing sports.
The final point adds punch to the third. When I screw up and things turn south, I tend to rationalize like mad. That needs to stop. It needs to be replaced by ‘Yes, you screwed up (big time, perhaps), but you’re still plenty good enough’.
To summarize:
- Turning a blind eye to the future allow for making the best use of the present
- Justification for interests needs to be emotional rather than logical
- The best results happen when no results are forecasted
- Isolate internal worth from external results
Each of these reduces anxiety and gets the personal machine running much cleaner. I’ll be practicing these daily. With any luck, soon you won’t have to put up with any more complaints about wasting time. I’ll have to start looking for new things to whine about to keep interest up.
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