Day: July 9, 2018

I’m listening to Redshirts by John Scalzi. I like the man–as a human. I had the opportunity to chat briefly with him following a presentation he did with Cory Doctorow. Both men are engaging experts in the field in which they write. It reminded me of being at the ASU conference recently and recognizing the difference between a touring writer and a guy who writes in the time between teaching, coaching, and watching a crap ton of TV. You’ll note that I didn’t even mention games. I’ve been playing more in the last few days but far far less overall. You’ll also note that I am not including phone-based games, which consume at least an hour of my allotted 24.

I am a pretty good reader/listener/watcher. I consume fiction daily and make it probably the largest part of my day. I’ve written in the past about the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ philosophy, which holds true but you gotta eat something, right? I consume a ton of fiction and I believe it to be part of being a good writer. The other half–butt in chair–remains a huge short coming. Finally I’ve been able to align that mentally with the exercise as part of a regimen that is necessary towards continued healthy living.

I think it has something to do with yesterday’s blog.

I still believe the other part of why I often feel so paralyzed is a mixture of the inability to really get started on anything, the lack of sustainable drive to continue, and the failure to create a self-regulating schedule to enable any of it.

Big words too. Big words haunt me.

But back to the schedule issue: I need one. I need to be able to visualize a goal and see the path from end back to beginning, recognizing the small victories along the way. I need to incentivize–really incentivize and not just give myself the incentives for free–the small steps in order to encourage completion of the goal. In essence, I need to grow the hell up. I’m past 40 and I feel like a kid a lot of the times. Not physically, of course. I am old and broken down, but mentally I feel infantile at times as though I don’t need to be responsible for myself at all.

But I do.

No internet in the house, so here is yesterday’s entry into the blogosphere:

As I type stories are being written about a team of Thai soccer kids being rescued from a cave deep below the earth. In the room near me my family watches Sherlock Holmes. On my email a Quora debate rages as to the strongest Marvel characters. I sit here reflecting on my life and my limits, wondering why I never became the superhero my youth suggested.

I used to have this quote that went something like, “If I dropped out of society for twenty years, trained every day, I could become the ultimate badass.” I didn’t do any of that. In truth I allowed myself to continue to believe that a lack of specialization and, ultimately, dedication allowed me to still have the option to do anything. Reality suggests that I was very very wrong about this. In truth, I stopped learning and stopped improving. Instead my skillset hardened and atrophied around a very limited range of inputs and abilities. I didn’t get great at anything. My ability to get good at anything new rusted in place.

 

I’m knocking off much of that rust as we speak. See, the secret isn’t to drop everything to learn one thing or give up on specialization in order to wait for that perfect storm of knowing. Instead the key is to actually learn. The key is to do as Holmes does and observe and absorb it all. Learn everything around you and you will be learned.

 

Forty plus years to figure out the stuff I knew best as a baby.