I mentioned this week that a student asked me about maintaining motivation. I had a second thought related to that which today– on a day where it’s super clear to me– I want to share.
You need to have a scrum board for your life. A Trello, if you will. You need to set priorities.
Mine used to look like this:
Essential to Survival | On Fire | Pressing | Be Aware | Can Wait | When Bored
You live your life in this system by starting each day at the left and moving right, clearing as much as you can.
This semester, I had to add a new column: “On Fire-Let it Burn”
That is something that was hard for me, but allowing myself to see that such things exist has made my life easier. Allow me to elaborate.
We talked today– me and a few students before class– about group projects and how people sometimes fall through the cracks. I told them I try to build activities that don’t allow for that, as I was the one, all through school from like third grade to the end of my PhD, who was the one who did more work than everyone else (sometimes all the work). This even persisted into my first few teaching gigs. I’m the person who used to do all the work.
There’s an upside to that and a downside to that. The downside that is most obvious is that one shouldn’t do all the work, and over time if you do all the work, people start to think of you as the person who can’t say no, as the person who expends all his energy to do the job, etc. The obvious upside is that if you’re good– and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I am, in fact, pretty good at most of what I do– you get to make sure things that would otherwise fail succeed. That’s part of the reason why I was always willing to do the extra work. I don’t like seeing something go wrong.
But there’s a huge problem this creates, too. And this is a moment where I’m going to show all of you one of my scars and be brutally honest about myself. I have control issues. Not with people. I’m not a dominating person at all. But I have issues of needing to be in control of projects and to be the master of my own fate with my work. This extends from things as small as being the one to drive most places (so I know I don’t have to depend on anyone else being as defensive as a driver) to sometimes having to vent for hours over meetings or projects because I am sure that I know what is wrong and people won’t listen.
That last attitude is a bad one to have. Unfortunately– or fortunately– I have a remarkably high ratio of “was right” to “was wrong” in such situations. It’s good for me, I guess, but it makes me sort of oddly ill at ease with people sometimes when I shouldn’t be. I care about details. I care about efficient ways of doing things. I care about being inclusive. But sometimes, I’m just the Rick Sanchez in the room, so positive that I know what should be done that while I don’t verbalize it (which would make me an asshole) I think it, and the thinking it is probably not healthy. Almost nothing frustrates me as much as a person who won’t listen when I think I have a valuable solution to offer, and I work in a field where often people are very closed minded.
This is what happens to the loner academic minded creative, though. I’ve been left to my own devices so often that I’m used to having to figure it out on my own. I love to work with groups, and I enjoy the melding of ideas, but at the heart of things, when something starts going sideways, I’m very likely to try to do it myself because I know I have faith that I’ll get it done right (or close enough to right that everyone is okay).
That used to result in me taking on things that were, to follow the metaphor of “on fire” to a logical conclusion, at a lethal burn. There are fires that can’t be put out. Look at a wildfire as it rages through a dying forest. I’ve always been the sort to leap into the fire and start trying to salvage things.
I’m doing too many things now, though. Not too many things like “woe is me, I work so hard.” But too many things in that if one project I am nominally a part of is burning to the studs with no sign of salvation, I have to let that structure go so that I can devote my energy to other things.
I feel like at 40 this has taught me what the people who didn’t do the work in the groups all those years already knew: it’ll be okay. I wouldn’t ever let a critical thing in my life burn down, but if I can’t rescue a friend’s project because I need to devote myself to my own work, that’s alright. I shouldn’t torment myself over it. I have to do what I have to do and get by on what I can get by on.
It’s a hard lesson learned.
But I recommend to everyone that if more than five things in your life are on fire– even if it’s the worst case you can imagine– you’re letting two or three things burn you that can either burn to rubble or which are someone else’s problem.
Learn from my mistakes. Don’t try to carry everything. My mother did that her whole life, and it broke her back. Literally.
Cling to that which is important, that which you love. Give it your all.
But learn to let other things go.