EPTGoals
We all have them. Each of us imagines ourselves in the future, successful in one respect or another, completing various tasks that we deem important. I’ll even list some of my own aspirations:
-
-
- Read the ever-growing pile of books next to my night stand
- Learn at least one new recipe every month
- Become fluent in mandarin Chinese
- Get (another) medal at a fencing tournament + Show Spoiler +
(I should really have 3 by now, but I’m stuck with only one... -.-‘)
- Learn a new, challenging flute solo
Etc., etc. You get my gist. These are things that I deem important. I think about them and I say to myself, “Hmm.... That sounds worthy to me. I want to achieve or do that someday.” So I get out my fancy lil’ planner and write it down at some arbitrary date in the future. I start planning ahead by setting strict benchmarks that are intended to incentivize and motivate me to reach my end goal. After all of that, I begin my quest, with a smile on my face and a fire in my heart, destined to succeed.
But then, y’know what I get hit with?...
Distractions
We all run into these as well. Sure, I think I can have lunch now; 9:00 A.M. isn't early, right? Oh, I'll "need" something to watch while I'm eating. Y'know, I always wanted to try that beer everyone tells me about. Whaddaya know! Victor Davis Hanson has a new column up!! Guess I better go read that! Nah, don't want to exercise today; Halo 4 just came out and I'm too cheap to buy it. ...Bored now. Gonna refresh my Subscribed Threads page 50 times. Hmm, I still have a half hour till my next class. I can go and masturbate real quick....
The point I’m trying to get at here is that despite knowing that our previously-laid goals are beneficial and noble and worthy of our investment, we fall prey to short-term “fixes” of sorts that eat up our priceless time. We devote said time to these things, things that appear trivial and inconsequential and unimportant when compared to the grand standards that we had set originally.
I especially fall prey to video games, and what I’ll call “General Section” arguments. + Show Spoiler +
Thanks, TeamLiquid. You’re both. 
...But notice what I said there. I gave an “excuse.” It’s not even a veritable reason, but an “excuse.” These “excuses” I see as problems, hindrances, to my goals. They fake themselves as “reasons,” but they lead to ever greater addiction. We use them to conclude that following through with our distractions is worth investing our time, though in our hearts we know this to be untrue. What were those laudable goals we espoused just a minute ago?! Don’t care, this silly YouTube vid caught my eye and it’s obviously more important. Etc., etc.
To you and I right now, that statement sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it? Why the heck would we sit down to watch a pointless video that will inevitably add next to nothing to our lives when there’s still so much actual stuff to do? And yet, we still often fail in our more noble endeavors, taking the “easy way out” so to speak, and we feed our addiction to diversions, making them only harder to overcome in the future. These temptations vary from person to person; they will undoubtedly be something different for you as they are for me. But the effect they have on us is the same: we trade our irrecoverable time for short-term satisfaction, which delays our long-term objectives ever longer. Each hour I spend raising an arbitrary and unimportant (for me, anyway) “score” or number in a game, is an hour I did not and cannot spend on my true desires. It is now gone, invested in that game, and thus, that experience (for better or worse) becomes a part of me.
“You Are What You Put Your Time Into”
Now we’re coming full circle with the title of this blog. This will require some backstory.
I graduate next May. I’ve been blessed with a job offer upon my eventual completion of school. Coincidentally, since I received the offer at the tail end of my internship this past summer, I’ve known about it before school even started. This is obviously awesome news!! I don’t have to worry about searching for employment or applying for graduate school to companies or institutions that may or may not accept me. It’s a major load off my chest, knowing that I have work that I enjoy, guaranteed for me immediately upon graduating, that pays decently, in an area I’m now familiar with, and for a company I trust and that values me as an employee.
Of course, there is at least one major drawback. Due to the nature of the job, I am required to move to an entirely different state for no less than one year of my life, and unless I choose to go to grad school sometime afterwards, I would be staying there for quite some time. The place is in the middle of nowhere; the nearest Wal-Mart is 45 minutes away, lol. (but hey, the movie theater is only 4 bucks
) In less than seven months, I would be physically away from all of my friends, family, and relatives for an indefinite period of time. Yeah, I can text one or call another or Skype a third. But I can’t join them on a whim to do some harmless weekend folly or enjoy a meal with them any day I like.Don’t hear me wrong: I am not disappointed or frustrated by this job. Rather, I’m mad at myself for not engaging with my friends and family earlier in my college years. I blew numerous opportunities, which I now recognize as incredibly valuable, because I exalted distractions as more important. Instead of attending departmental outings with my classmates, I browsed political columns because I didn’t pay attention to the announcing e-mail and forgot. Instead of working on my armor, I played video games in order to needlessly satisfy an addictive mental urge to increase an imaginary amount of something that I allowed the game to make me think was more worthwhile. Instead of playing Magic with my floormates, I chose to gorge myself on butter-heavy popcorn and watch walkthroughs of games that I didn’t want to buy, but whose single-player campaign intrigued me enough to believe my time was worth sacrificing for it.
I can’t have that time back. It’s gone now, drifted away with the rest of the waste of the universe. And I feel I am less of whom I truly want to be because of that. My past experiences have all contributed to who I am today, and while there is no way I can go back and change that, I can recall many fond memories in my heart. But what I haven’t done, and what I could have done better, nags at me and makes me feel intensely regretful of my poor decisions. Of course I won’t be perfect; I need to learn to get over my small regrets because of that fact. Yet I see where I can still improve immensely in my own life to live a more fulfilled and content existence.
Now
Where does this leave me? This makes me want to value every minute of my life, at least for the next 6-7 months, very preciously. I don’t want to spend it waxing eloquence over the Internet (just writing this bugs me, lol, as it’s eating into my time as I type it X-D ) or watching dozens of animes or entrancing myself in worlds that don’t exist. I want to use it with my acquaintances and classmates. I want to accomplish what I can only do here at school, what I can’t do at my future job where I won’t have at my disposal quite so many important resources, namely human ones. I can (and likely will) play games and watch GSL and read books when I’m not working, eating, or sleeping next summer and beyond; I can’t quite as easily practice fencing, or complete my armor, or chill out with old friends.
My challenge to you is this: find something that you want to invest your time into, something that you want to remember and pride yourself for later down the road. For “what you put your time into, you become.” Prioritize your goals, and then prioritize what you need to do to attain those goals. Identify distractions that weaken your resolve and defocus you from your genuine yearnings; cut back on those distractions as much as possible; and when you are confronted with one such diversion, push it away and occupy your thoughts with something that advances you closer to your goals/priorities (this last bit is very important, as simply a “No” to the bad is not enough, but a “Yes” must also be given to the good to replace said bad, if you catch my drift).
In my own experience, I’ve learned that too much free time is a bad thing. I’ve learned this the hard way many, many times. I’ll think to myself, “Meh, that assignment isn’t due till Friday night,” but I’ll wait till that Friday afternoon to do the homework, rush through it, not understand a word of it, and turn it in to receive a disappointing C or worse. Relying on future motivation is tempting failure. On the other hand, well-structured schedules appear frustratingly strict, but if you stick to them, you’ll find that you’ll get more done during that time, and I would argue you will end up more satisfied with your results.
+ Show Spoiler +
(Some of you might think I'm viewing video games and StarCraft watching in a negative light. But remember, that's only my addiction I'm attempting to curb, and I am not at all suggesting that we should all abstain from games and such, lol. Perhaps your goal IS to become great at a certain game, and your distractions are ...well, whatever a competitive gamer finds not valuable, haha! I use these things as examples in my own life; yours will undoubtedly differ.)
Question of the Blog: What’s one of your "distractions" that you wish you could overcome, and what do you plan to do (if you haven't yet already begun) to advance past it?
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/FOH1H.jpg)
