I’ve gotten some advice recently:

Wise words. Just go; do your thing.

In high school, I just gave up trying to actually meet the demands of my schedule and getting the top rank of my class. For some classes, I even stopped turning in all my classwork on time. I just couldn’t pull another all nighter and keep my sanity.

I remember for one of my classes, I just didn’t hand in the project we were supposed to do. A few days later I dropped it on the teacher’s desk and said, “I hope I can still turn this in.”

Not only that but I did the project in a really fun weird way that I wouldn’t have been able to unless I had taken that extra time.

The result: I got a 100% on the project. And he took off 10% for turning it in late. 90% not too shabby. I started doing that for other classes. If I was stressed on time, I got more sleep, did better work on it, and just turned it in late, for still great grades even with some time penalties.

I realized maybe I didn’t have to take all this so seriously. Maybe I was even paying attention to the wrong things. Maybe I should instead maximize for how much fun I could have and what I could learn from the work instead of maximizing things like my class rank. Maybe I should just do it my way.

From then on, I enjoyed the rest of my time in highschool. And here’s the thing, I still ended up with a great GPA, and a high rank in school. I can’t tell you anymore what it was, still top 10, maybe even in the top 5. But I can’t remember, because I stopped looking. I stopped caring about it.

Instead, just doing as good a job as I could within some sane limits of my time and well being, and optimizing for my happiness, still produced great work. I was happier, and succeeded with what I wanted.

I didn’t give up when I was struggling, I kept going, but in my own way.

Ever spend some time thinking about what you are optimizing for? Is it stuff you have a real hard time controlling? Are you trying to out-do your competition by spending a great deal of time comparing how you stack up against them? Would you be better off still working hard, but making sure you were optimizing for how much fun you were having doing it?

A wise reminder from my precocious two-year-old. Worth thinking about as I go through some new struggles today.

Just go; do your thing.

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