@joncrowley: "I'm convinced that the key to failure is thinking of life as something that is done to you, rather than something you do."

It’s easy — comfortable, even! — to feel like you are stuck in a rut, a victim of circumstances that prevent you from being truly awesome, but it’s simply not true: you are always in control.

You can’t ensure the outcome of every endeavour you undertake, but you choose your actions, your reactions, your thoughts, and your words. Even though you command all of these things, you may still feel like you are burdened by obligation or paralyzed by fear.

Take the reins. Steer your life in the direction of your desires. Work hard to achieve those things which are most important to you as you cut away those things which bring you down. Don’t let life just happen to you. Your life is finite and fleeting. Be present and engaged in every single moment and wring out every bit of joy and excitement that you can. Unless you have a very strong belief in life after death, this time which is steadily elapsing is all you’ve got. Even if you do have faith, why waste time?

That’s what I think anyway, but it’s your call.

You can’t fix yourself.  You have to rebuild.

Take stock of who you are, where you are, and what has changed about your life and yourself.  And then do the things that will make you happier, make you smarter and better and stronger, and do them because you want to.  No one who is trying to fix a loss, or a heartache, is going to move on – if you do this, you are defining yourself by your tragedy.

This is such an important point that I felt I needed to echo it and add a bit of my own experience to it.

I’ve made the mistake of trying to “fix” myself. I’ve continued making that mistake for very many years. Jon explains that we can’t fix ourselves because we are simply so complex that it’s like trying to patch the foundation of a building. I’ve discovered that there’s an even more sinister factor at work when we try to fix ourselves.

To dedicate effort to fixing ourselves, we must first think that we are broken.

It’s sinister because in our well-intentioned attempts to improve the things we do not like about ourselves, we are subconsciously reinforcing the belief that our current state is unacceptable, that we are not good enough right now. Nothing could be worse for self-esteem.

If you are truly “broken” you will heal with time, just as your body does. If you feel that the requisite time has passed but you are still deeply injured, I would suggest seeking professional help to put yourself firmly on the path to recovery (again, just as with our bodies). But if you assume you are broken, I challenge you to question that assumption.

My attempts at self-improvement had always started from the position that I am currently not acceptable and that I must fix myself to become good enough. But then I noticed situations in which I thought a lot worse of myself than others thought of me and it caused me to question the way I think about myself. I realized that contrary to what I believed then, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with me. I am acceptable as I am now.

The lesson I have learned about trying to “fix” ourselves, then, is this:

Start from the position of accepting yourself for what you currently are, then figure out how to do even better. Do not “fix”, improve!

Self-esteem expressed in Ruby

It’s a valuable life lesson made incredibly concise in my favourite programming language, Ruby. I leave the interpretation to the reader. It relates to some themes that I’ve already written about before and will probably write more about in the future.

About a week ago there was a discussion about this on programming Reddit. The original poster, a programmer, feels a sense of inferiority because while others can succinctly explain the “awesome” in what they’re doing, he cannot. I sympathize with this sentiment. I love what I do but how do I transfer that passion without drowning the other person in the technical details? It feels like without the finer, technical details, my job description becomes distilled to “I make websites.”

Really? That’s it? That’s what I do for a living?

But is the problem really that what we’re doing isn’t interesting to the layperson? Web developers built Google, Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, and many more technologies that people use every day. We are building cool web applications that, while they might not gain the same degree of popularity or critical mass, can potentially provide just as much value. If we didn’t think that web development was an awesome career, a lot of us probably wouldn’t be doing it.

(And by the way, if you’re making money doing something you have absolutely no passion for, you might want to try and fix that.  Just sayin’.)

So why do we have difficulty getting people to identify with this?  Perhaps this comment from the Programming Reddit discussion might shed some light on the topic (emphasis mine):

Obnoxious braying girl: (To me and a friend) Oh, i bet i can guess what you do! go on, let me! (Obnoxious braying girl makes a few guesses about my friend’s job, eventually works out he does some sort of admin thing in publishing, polite words exchanged about this field) Obnoxious braying girl: (to me) Hmm.. you’re… a graphic designer? Me: hah! god no OBG: A journalist? Me: Well, that does sound like fun, but no (back and forth for a bit until she eventually asks me what i do Me: (in jokey, self deprecating tone) – I’m a massive nerd, basically – I program computers and make websites for people OBG: oh, right… (she stares down into her drink) Me: (trying to salvage this conversation) – so, and what do you do? OBG: Oh, i work at a corporate events company! it’s really exciting, basically we…. Cue 15 minutes of skull-numbingly boring monologue about basically being a travel-agent for corporations. It puzzles me though – why is anyone who doesn’t work with computers given licence to go on and on about their job (Despite the fact that asking people about work is basically a social nicety and not interesting at all to anyone socially), wheras anyone whose interests (whether work based or not) include anything technology or science-based are automatically percieved as boring socially-inept people who can’t talk about anything else? Fuck that shit – next time i’m introduced to someone I’m going straight into explaining recursion.

There are a few things that one could criticize here but the point I’ve decided to focus on here is the blatant self-deprecation. If you read the rest of the comments in the discussion, you might notice, like I have, that this is actually surprisingly common — it’s like many of us have been conditioned to believe that what we do is simply not interesting to a vast majority of people, so we might as well just say “I do computer stuff” and get it over with.

Alun Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of New Scientist magazine, would beg to differ (emphasis mine again):

Science writing used to be slightly apologetic: [puts on whiny voice] “this is all going to be terribly difficult, but I’ll try and make it easy for you”. Like they’ve sugar coated something you don’t really want to take. Our goal was to really change that – change the people and the ideas – to be self-confident. Science often suffers from this sort of cringe factor – “I’m a boring scientist, you probably don’t want to talk to me”. My policy was if you’re talking to someone else the approach is: “what’s happening in science is the most interesting thing in the world, and if you don’t agree with me just fuck off, because I’m not interested in talking to you”. You had to have that kind of attitude. That tended to be the kind of attitude of people in the arts: [in snooty voice - think Brian Sewell] “Of course I am doing something interesting”, so I took the same attitude. If you’re not interested, I don’t want to explain to you – you’re just a fucking idiot, so get out of my way! And it worked, because if you write like, “I’m really interested in this, it’s not only interesting its really important. If you can’t see this, you’re probably a moron!” It works. It has to be true to a degree. Otherwise it’s just piped bullshit, or triumphalism or something. The thing is, it is really interesting and important. People from the sciences do often have massive inferiority complexes.

I believe that what I do is interesting, important, and valuable. If I didn’t, I’d be doing something else. And so, I will endeavour to find a way to convey that value and importance and when someone asks me what I do, that is how I will answer.

Anyone who absolutely can’t identify with my passion for what I do is probably somebody I really wouldn’t like anyway.

“When I get sad, I stop being sad and be AWESOME instead. True story.”
– Barney Stinson (played by Neil Patrick Harris), How I Met Your Mother

I think that this is an incredibly inspirational line. While it seems kind of silly to take advice from a television show, I think it makes an excellent point: it is the times when you are at your lowest that you must put in your absolute best. Energy spent being worried and sad can and should be reallocated to taking action and facing the very things that are bringing you down.

And really, all else being equal, being awesome is much more, well, awesome than being sad.

Sometimes, it seems like it is impossible to reconcile self-acceptance with the desire to grow and improve. After all, if you accept yourself as you are, what reason do you have to grow? And so, we might compromise one way or the other. I’ve found that I push myself really hard to improve and often don’t fully accept myself as I am. But do self-acceptance and growth really need to be mutually exclusive?