Standards are an interesting thing. They don't dictate exact performance, but they do sketch out a ballpark. If you expect yourself to read a book a week, you may not actually do that, but you'll probably read a book most weeks. If a boss tells you to have something done one month from now, you'll probably get it done sometime around then. Not two weeks earlier, but not two weeks later, either. Standards work to guide performance by creating an idea of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. They shape our priorities, trying to maximize the amount of acceptable things we do and minimize the unacceptable ones.
It's interesting to think about where our standards come from. Why is forty hours a week the standard for a full week of work? Why isn't it less? Why isn't it more? Is that standard really right for everyone? Our societal standard for healthy eating is to eat anything that qualifies as non-dessert, preferably not entirely fried, and then a small amount of something that is dessert. Most people hover around that-- no one eats ice cream for every meal.
It's no secret how I feel about, well, pretty much all societal standards, and since you're reading my blog, chances are you don't subscribe to all of society's standards either.
When you DO subscribe to these standards, you don't ever need to police yourself. Society will keep you there automatically through peer pressure. If you don't work very much, people will call you a slacker. If you don't work at all, your mom will call you and tell you to get a job. If you work too hard, unless you're in a specific industry which has a high standard for work quantity, people will actually encourage you to work LESS. You'll even see this on my blog, where suggest that I ought to have more balance/fun/etc.
The thing is, when you have your own standards, you alone become responsible for enforcing them. You have to step up and become your own boss. When you become your own boss, you have a battle on two fronts. On one side you have to push against the pressure of society, and on the other side you have to push yourself to put in the effort to reach your own standards. It's not easy work, especially if you're not used to it.
The hardest case is when your standards require you to push beyond what society expects of you. Most people you know will be telling you that you've done enough, most people you don't know will tell you the same thing. Even part of your brain will be saying, "Come on... this is good enough. Okay, fine just do a little bit more. No need to push it too far, though." The only solution is to push back and hold on to your standards.
You have to monitor yourself. Most people don't really even do that. Then you have to be able to objectively evaluate yourself. Even fewer people do that. In particular, you have to be able to identify and admit weakness. Then you have to push. Most of all, you have to have faith that everyone else is wrong about you. That's a tough thing, right? Everyone else says that watching a couple hours of TV per day is just fine. You have to have the arrogance to think that most of the developed world is wrong.
You basically have to go through this process for everything, because once that fragile bond of trust is broken-- the one where you rely on the world to tell you what is okay-- you can't help but question pretty much everything. It works the same way interpersonal trust works-- if someone lies to you once, you suddenly can't take anything they tell you at face value.
Other people will offer you suggestions, advice, even ultimatums. So will society. It's worth listening to what you hear, because it's not all totally senseless. Everything is as it is for a reason, but it's up to you to figure out what that reason is and whether or not it's valid. At the end of the day, the whole world can be your adviser but you have to be your own boss. You set the goals. You evaluate progress. You dole out encouragement or discipline.
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Photo is a painting that I really like.
In my last post i talked about what NOW is the right time for. The implication, of course, is that there are certain periods of time where you can actually take advantage of opportunities that come your way. Let's call that your Opportunity Window. In the Standard American Lifestyle, that window is narrow. Really narrow. It probably starts somewhere at the end of senior year in college and ends a few months afterwards.
There are small blips of opportunity afterwards, too. Getting fired creates a window. Some sort of windfall income might create a window.
That sucks. Someone with a Standard American Life probably has no more than a year of Opportunity Window in their lifetime. It's only during those times that they can start a new business, leave their lives behind and try something new and exciting, or just make a drastic change.
I used to dislike to work. I saw how most people lived their lives, slogging through work that they hated, and I was determined not to fall into that trap. I made the mistake of generalizing, lumping all work together in the same bucket.
Since then, things have changed. In terms of monumental personal life changes, becoming a hard worker is the most recent one I've undergone. About a year ago, for reasons I touched on in this post, I decided that it was imperative for me to become a hard worker. I didn't do it because I had suddenly fallen in love with work, but rather because I had began to feel as though I was behind. And believe me, it wasn't love at first sight.
To fall in love with hard work, you must understand why it's necessary. When I was young I was told that sugar was bad, but I never understood exactly why it was bad, so I kept eating it. Only when I learned how it chemically affected my body did I finally give it up. The same is true of work-- if you don't know why you have to work hard and love it, you'll probably never actually do it.
Work is your gift to the world. That sounds corny, but it's true. And believe me, you owe the world a gift or two. Think of all of the various things that millions of people around the world have done for you to enjoy the life you have. They made up languages, invented stuff, procreated at the exact right times to create your ancestry, and managed to not kill each other in the process. We're lucky to be here, and the high standard of living we all enjoy now is only because of those who came before us. Some, like Einstein, had huge impact, but even people you don't notice, like the janitors, are making your life better.
