Rocket Bear Games Blog

For the longest time, I’ve regarded myself as a bit of lazy bum.  I hated homework; I still feel bad about stressing Mom out when I was in school.  In university, papers would get put off until the deadline and get mysteriously written overnight.  I wouldn’t bother doing the assigned reading and rarely did the problems.  The only thing that saved me was my ability to learn freakishly fast and my natural talent for the stuff I was learning.  When that failed, I was in for a deep shock (it happened in second year, after I became used to coasting through the first year courses).  I did well in school, overall – I got scholarships and wrote a honours thesis, but I knew that I was operating at 70% capacity.  People with more hustle waved at me as they passed ahead.

A similar pattern followed me at work.  Some days I would be ripping through tasks like a madman and other days I just couldn’t be bothered with it.  I’d stare at the screen and be feeling the most intense mind-numbing feeling of boredom ever experienced by man.  Things were better for my personal projects, but there would still be days where I put in maybe 1 hour of useful effort.

You can see why I didn’t have too high of an opinion of my work ethic.  Here’s the thing, though.  This whole perception of myself that I built up as a smart lazy guy was complete BS.

Let me tell you why.

Last September, I switched to a new job.  My whole life, I knew that I wanted to be a programmer, like my dad.  I did cute Sim-City lookalikes in Logo when I was in elementary school.  By the time I got to Uni, I demolished first year because I already knew everything they were about to teach.  In high-school, I actually thought that the only good I’d get from a degree was as a piece of paper (har har har!).  In other worlds, typical self-taught programmer story.

Well, last September I ditched programming and became a business analyst.  I don’t code at work any more – it’s more of a design position.  My job is to understand the product from a business standpoint and to communicate that to the developers.  Needless to say, this was a big change for me.

So, here I am in September, starting my new job.  I’m pumped as hell – ready to completely crush it.  Somehow in the middle of all this excitement I decide to run for 45 minutes in the morning every day.  Now, I’m terribly out of shape – I’m out of breath after going up a large set of stairs.  So, I decide to get up at 5am every morning, weekdays, weekends, whatever and run.  And it’s hell.  At first, I can only do pathetic little 10-20 meter runs, buffered by walking.

Now, given my past history, what would you say is the predicted outcome of the above endeavour?  I run around like a maniac for a couple of weeks and then give up, right?  If you asked me last summer, that’s what I would have told you.

WRONG!

I’ve been doing some sort of exercise for 45 min every day ever since September.  Sometimes I ran when it was raining; then I got a stationary bike.  There were days when I came home dead tired and ready to fall asleep, but then somehow I was pedalling at 10pm at night.  Tuns out, I’m quite a tenacious bastard.  Now it’s bleeding into other parts of my life.  I’m crushing it at work and jumping on anything that looks a tiny bit like procrastination.

What’s the point? Did I suddenly get a magic willpower boost?  Well, running does give me a ton of energy (who would have thought that sweating like a dog for half an hour would to that?).  That’s not the whole story, however.

After I kept my exercise up for a week, I started to become proud of what I was doing.  Slowly, it grew into a big thing in my mind.  This is why I’ve never missed a day for 6 months – if I did, I’d be demolishing a large monument to my perseverance.  No matter how tired or lazy I am at any particular point, that feeling just doesn’t measure up to what I’d lose if I slacked off.

Most of the things that we believe about ourselves are fiction – stories that we made up while we were growing up.  They aren’t you, they’re just some random crap that happened to you when you were young.  If you view yourself as someone who gets stuff done, you will be that person.  If you think that you’re a slacker or an amazing athlete or an artist or the greatest game designer in the world, you will become these people.

It’s all about the story that you tell yourself to describe your life.

If you wish to become someone else, change your story.  Start with a small corner of your life – something that you can hang on to and then build outward.  Keep this up and eventually, a new person will be staring at you from the mirror.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 6th, 2010 at 9:52 am and is filed under Personal Growth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.