Personal

I am in an uncharacteristically good mood today. About three weeks ago I posted my last rambling, which was a rant about my life sucking. Although many things have not changed, a couple have, and more importantly, I’m able to look at some of the positive aspects of my life.

I realized recently that being unemployed has been good for me. I’m doing things now that I haven’t done in a long time. Getting around to things that I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, but never seemed to get to. I’ve read books, I’ve repaired my bicycle, I’ve actually sat down and coded some things, I’ve gone to the movies, I’ve gone to Ren Faire, I’ve spent time with people, and I’ve posted a rambling or two.

Mind you, I still need a job. Moreso now than when last I wrote. Money is running out at an alarming rate, and I need to get a job soon or I may have some problems. I’m going to start pursuing employment more actively tomorrow. (I would’ve started today, but A: it’s a federal holiday, so many places won’t be open, and 2: I was awake for 38 hours straight this weekend; I need today for recovery.) Wish me luck; in this job market, I’ll need it.

My programming has come along acceptably well. I think that part of my problem was that my resources were sub-par. I ditched the book I was using and picked up another one, which has many good reviews and seems to be heralded as the Windows Programming Bible.

Also contributing to my sudden and unexpected feeling of well-being is a conversation I had yesterday evening. A few months ago I inadvertantly created a deep rift between myself and someone in my family that I care about deeply. Last night we had a long conversation which had been brewing in my mind for a long time, and I think it went a long way towards closing that rift, or at least creating a bridge across it. This is a great relief. 🙂

Also, I spent yesterday at Ren Faire, which was a lot of fun, and a met some really cool people there. Hopefully I’ll be going back in a coupla weeks. I need to buy stuff there, too, which means that I need a job. It’ll be worth it, though.

Oh, well, off I go to a recruiter tomorrow with my resumes in hand and some decent-looking clothing on my back.

Hi, all. Almost a year since I last posted on this section of the site. Dunno why, just haven’t had much to say, I guess. But now I feel the need to whine, so here I am.

I’ve been unemployed for over two months now. The job market here in the Silicon Valley isn’t what it was two years ago when I first went job hunting, and now with much more experience behind me, I’m finding it far more difficult to generate interest in my resume. I’ve reached that point where sitting on my ass doing nothing all day just isn’t as satisfying as it used to be. Imagine that.

Boredom sets in.

Okay, so, given that, I figured I would go and teach myself another skill, say, Windows programming. This… this is kind of depressing. I’m just not as interested as I used to be. I can’t seem to make myself stick with it. I used to sit down and learn a new language or a new skill without any trouble. I would find some documentation, download any necessary software, and sit down and learn it. On rare occasions, I would also use a processed tree carcass. Now, though, even with all the necessary paraphernalia, I find that I’m just not into it. I learn a little, lose interest, and end up playing a game or reading a novel. This lack of ability to focus on learning something new about the subject that I have been studying, officially and unofficially, for a third of my life is very disturbing to me. I used to define myself by my ability to do this. What’s happening to me? Why can I no longer concentrate on the one thing I’m good at? What kind of mental entropy (mentropy?) is this that has silently snuck in and taken root in my mind while I was too busy working a full-time job to notice? What can I do about it? Very upsetting.

One final depressing component of my situation completes the summary of where I am in life, and that is the fact that I am chronically single. Seriously, if singleness were considered a disease, I could be the poster child. On the other hand, I’ve done little to rectify the situation, so I’ve little right to bitch. I’m not so much avoiding relationships as refraining from seeking them out. A personal choice, yes, but still somewhat depressing.

Directionless. In mental decline. Afraid. Alone.

That, it seems, is a summary of my life this summer.

Well, after writing “A Lesson Learned Late”, I decided that a few points needed reiteration in a pithier format. So:

Short version of the rambling: I now know why I hated high school. I was working for the system when I could have been working for myself. I strongly regret my school career. I’ve learned more in two years out of school than I learned in 13 years in it. One lesson I have learned which could not have been taught in a classroom is how to have goals. Without that, college would have been an utter disaster for me. Another lesson was independence. I needed to learn to make my own decisions, to provide for myself, and to take responsibility for my own future.

Now that I have discovered why school was so fruitless for me, it can once again have value. I need to return with my new understanding, because in the last two years, I have become receptive to what it has to offer.

Time for a brief autobiographical interlude.

I graduated high school a few months later than was scheduled, over a matter of two science credits. After high school, I took classes off and on for a few quarters at my local community college, drifting aimlessly, not knowing where I was going. I was simultaneously making a half-hearted effort at job-searching, but wasn’t finding anything. When people would ask what I was doing with myself, work, school, etc, I would half-jokingly say I was “growing”. After some parental pressure to make up my mind and either go to school full-time or get a job, I opted for the latter.

That brings us to November of 1999, when I got my first job, working as a quality engineer for a software company. I realized at the time that it was a serious decision, and that changing my mind would not be an option. Not long after that, this realization was emphasized when I was forced to move to a higher-rent apartment in a different part of the Bay Area. My contribution to the rent, which previously made life easier, was now a necessary part of the budget, without which my father and I would not be able to keep the apartment in which we now live. This brings us to the present. My course is set; I am locked into the decision I made.

I do not regret it.

Don’t get me wrong, I often think about college, about what experiences I may be missing out on, about how much fuller and richer my knowledge of the world could be with a college education. But I also know that I could not have been successful at college if I had gone immediately after high school. It would have had its benefits, but I think that the true value of it would have been lost on me. There were things that I needed to learn which cannot be taught in a classroom.

Now I want to go back a few steps. It’s time to take a look at my experiences in high school.

My freshman and sophomore years of high school were a very unhappy time for me. Aside from my dismal lack of common ground with my peers, I was floundering academically, as I had been since early in junior high. I felt trapped and manipulated, forced to learn against my will when I’d have been just as happy to learn all kinds of things on my own if they would just leave me alone. I was inundated with assignments and notebooks and projects and all manner of teaching devices designed to cram my head full of whatever was deemed important by whoever it is that writes up school curricula. It all seemed so forced and contrived, and I wanted no part of it. I had my interests (computers, mainly) and was pursuing those on my own outside of school. All this effort that was being put into leading me by the nose to knowledge was merely strengthening my resolve to fight. The last quarter of my sophomore year was sheer misery as I convinced myself that high school was nothing more than an inescapable prison without any bars. I went from class to class doing just enough to get by, and sometimes not even that. I realized that I couldn’t do that anymore. Grades aside, I simply couldn’t stand that sort of imprisonment anymore. Thus, I sought out alternatives.

Among the alternatives was a program called Middle College. It was offered jointly through my school district and the local community college district. The idea was that for three hours a day, students would attend high-school-level classes on the college campus. In addition, they would be required to take (and pass) 7-9 units of college classes per quarter. These classes would still have to be selected to fulfill the high school graduation requirements, but they counted double for high school credit in addition to the college credit earned. This sounded good to me, as it gave me the opportunity to choose my own classes, and even with the restrictions, it had to be better than being herded through a series of high school classes.

So, in one of the most driven acts of my life, I gathered as much information as I could on Middle College, sold my parents on the idea, and applied.

Best move I ever made.

Middle College allowed me the freedom I needed to pursue my own interests. I signed up for a few classes at Foothill College and attended my English and History classes daily. I was taking college classes that taught me what I wanted to know, not classes that were prescribed for me by some faceless administrator as the cure for my ignorance. My grades quickly improved, and I pulled a 4.0 in my college classes that first quarter. Though I still did not perform as well as I could have in the Middle College core classes, my grades improved somewhat there, too. Indeed, even my ability to interact socially with people my own age was improving, though this benefit wouldn’t be fully realized until late in my senior year.

I didn’t realize it then, but Middle College had planted the seed of a lesson in my mind, which has only just recently sprouted in my mind, and without which, college would be a waste.

You see, even after Middle College, I still harbored some resentment for the system, for the rules. What kind of a system allows an intelligent person to fail to graduate over TWO credits out of a total of 220? It seemed ludicrous. I took a class to fill in the credits, graduated, and spent a few quarters fuming over it and wondering what to do next. That brings us back to the beginning of this rambling.

Fast-forward to the present. (Wish I had this kind of control over time in real life as well as in my writing.)

So, here I am, 20 years old, fairly intelligent, and working instead of going to college. As I said, I do not regret my choice. However, it’s not good enough to last me my whole life. You see, the lesson that Middle College taught me, which I couldn’t understand until I learned some lessons which cannot be taught in a classroom, was this:

My education isn’t about the system. It’s not about the credits or the diploma or the degrees or the teachers or books or grades.

It’s about ME. It’s about me doing what I want to do with my life, what I choose to do with my life.

It’s all about me.

Last time, I theorized two types of Drive, internal and external. I withdraw that thought. After further discussion with my sources (okay, it was Aaron again), I came to the conclusion that the internal Drive IS in fact well-shrouded external Drive, as I had feared. This was something of a let-down to me, as I had hoped (perhaps naively) to find that internal Drive was set apart from external Drive, somehow “different” and “special”. Perhaps this was a defense mechanism at work, attempting to shield me from responsibility for my own lack of Drive. “I wasn’t born with it” would be such an easy way out.

Sources of Drive

Anyhow, Aaron suggested a few possible sources of Drive: status needs, needfor recognition, need for identity, and so forth. The common thread always seemed to be the word “need”. This reminded me of a discussion from high school about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Maslow’s Hierarchy

Abraham Maslow studied human needs and divided them up into categories. He then ordered these categories based on their dependencies. He postulated that a given category of needs could not be addressed until the requirements of all previous categories had been met. Depending on the source, I’ve heard a number of categories ranging from 5-8. I suspect that Maslow updated his theory once or more, creating multiple “revisions” of it.

Maslow’s five categories of needs (I’ve chosen the simplest model for this discussion) were as follows:

• Survival
• Safety
• Belonging
• Esteem
• Self-Actualization

These would all seem to be fairly straight-forward except for self-actualization. The idea here is a fulfillment of potential. A self-actualized individual would be constantly learning and growing, as well as accomplishing, and helping others to do the same.

Maslow’s Hierarchy as a Source of Drive

Both of my formerly-proposed two types of drive can be explained using these categories of needs. Each of my stated sources of external drive is fairly easy to restate in terms of a need: Fear is an expression of worry over one’s safety needs. Love helps to fulfil one’s belonging and esteem needs. This is pretty easy to see.

What’s not as easy to see without the context of Maslow’s Hierarchy is that even when the external motivator is not as visible, it is still present. A previously inexplicable drive can now be explained in terms of a need. Those that I see as being most applicable to your average person (whose most basic needs are met) are the three higher-level needs, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.

Belonging

The need for belonging can drive a person, although I don’t think this is nearly as common as the higher-level needs. A need to fit in with a certain group of people can drive someone, but I think that if someone were looking for social acceptance, people with high levels of Drive are not the group they’d be looking to join, as driven people tend to be looked at or labelled negatively by the mainstream population.

Esteem

Here I think we see a real potential source of Drive. The need for esteem, either from others or from oneself, can certainly be a source of Drive. As I noted before, drive is the source of achievement. Without the Drive to accomplish, one cannot DO anything, no matter how intelligent one is. Achievement, in turn, is frequently a source of esteem and self-esteem, and as such contributes to the fulfillment of that need. Thus, the need for esteem can generate drive.

Self-Actualization

This, I think, is the most valuable source of Drive, and the least selfish. This is the closest that there is to the chimera that was internal Drive. It is a Drive to achieve simply because achievement is part of growing. I am not yet certain whether I believe that intentionally attempting to drive oneself for this purpose is valid, or if the Drive must come naturally to be genuine. Perhaps I’ll explore that in a later rambling.

What Else?

This rambling is just an outline of some of my ideas. I think that more of Maslow’s eventual 8 levels of needs could work with this idea of drive, and I may explore that option at a later date. Also, more ramblings will follow soon as I explore how Maslow’s ideas relate to the ideas of Robert M. Pirsig, inventor (discoverer?) of the Metaphysics of Quality and author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (which I read earlier this year) and Lila (which I’m reading now). Look for something new on that in the next week or two. Here’s a teaser, in which I discuss how Maslow’s concept of needs and Pirsig’s concept of values might interact:

“Needs are values. If you need something, it has a high value to you. There are two kinds of values: those that you choose (wants, e.g. your own home, time for recreation, luxury items, etc.), and those that are chosen for you (needs, e.g. food, oxygen, water, etc.)”

Until next time, in the words of Jack Horkheimer, “Keep looking up!”

I have had a bit of a personal revelation lately, and I’d like to take some time to explore it here in the dark reaches of my mind.

The revelation was this: Drive.

No, it’s not a command, and I’ve no intention of going after that driver’s license yet. In this context, it’s a noun. And it’s an important noun.

Drive is at the center of accomplishment. Without drive, one cannot work up the motivation to achieve. But what exactly is it? I’ve asked myself this question a number of times in the last couple of weeks. It’s not an easy question to answer.

Drive, from what I can tell, is on the outskirts of a number of other qualities. In the days leading up to my realization of the importance of drive, the idea teased me, always eluding me when I searched for just the right word to encapsulate it. I was attempting to describe a characteristic that I saw in someone, and never could seem to get it just right. All of the words that I considered and rejected are the ideas on the periphery of drive. Here, in the order that I recall them, are a few examples of these words:

• Motivation
• Gumption
• Stick-to-it-ive-ness
• Ambition
• Capability
• Effectiveness

None of these, for me, encompass all the things that make up drive. They all leave something out, or hit just barely off the mark that “drive” hits perfectly.

It was, actually, a friend of mine who solved this riddle for me, quite by accident. I read him a passage from Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (which, by the way, I highly recommend) regarding gumption. He mentioned to me that his preferred term for what Pirsig refers to as “gumption” is “drive”. As soon as he said it, the idea clicked into place, and I realized that my word-search was over. (Thanks, Aaron!)

It was also during this conversation that I realized what a deficit there is of this vital quality of drive among the members of my generation. We are not, on the whole, as driven as previous generations were. Perhaps I am incorrect in this evaluation, as I’m basing it on a rather small sample population, but I have observed a startling lack of motivation and ambition in myself and my peers.

Why is this so disturbing to me? Why does it bother me so much? Because drive is the only sure way to any sort of improvement. Only through wanting something enough to devote time and effort to it can we actually improve our lives, or the lives of others. Intelligence, though helpful, is subordinate in importance to drive. Good intentions, similarly, are certainly a positive, but without the drive (there’s that WORD again!) to act on them, they accomplish nothing.

I certainly have more to say on this topic, but the need for sleep before work in the morning must take precedence over my web ramblings. My next rambling should come up within a few days, and will cover more ideas related to drive, including my categorization of types and sources of drive, and possibly how I think it interacts with other positive qualities.

Here it is, the beginning of 2000. It’s been a few days more than two years since I wrote It’s 1998. Do you know where your life is at? In a month and a half I will be 20. I have grown and changed since I wrote that rambling. Despite the fact that to do so is to perpetrate a heinous crime against my native language, I am once again forced to ask myself: Where am I at? Of course, I still don’t mean in a physical sense, but in more of a philosophical, rambly sense. I find, that, while I’ve grown and changed a lot, where I’m at is still not at all where I’d like to be at.

I have made some strides in the areas of independence and self-sufficiency, but not nearly enough. Here, two years down the road, I still haven’t acheived all of my one-year goals.

These were the goals I listed two years ago:

• A job.
• A car.
• A life.
• My own home.

Let’s take a look at what I’ve done and what I haven’t done about each of these since then:

A job.

I am now employed. I work at a software company in Milpitas, which is quite hectic, but I like what I’m doing. The money is nice, but it has not yet given me the independence that I need. I am now able to support myself, and though I live with my father, I do pay half the rent, utilities, etc. It is nice to be able to spend money – MY money – without being accountable to anyone for where it goes.

A car.

This is still an issue, and right now it is the biggest hurdle on my road to independence. The truth is, I don’t want to drive. Have you seen what traffic is like in the Bay Area? It’s ridiculous. Yet transportation is necessary, and often public transit doesn’t cut it. It’s too slow, and too unreliable. I need a quick way to get where I’m going without having to deal with commute traffic and idiot drivers and car insurance and the expense of gasoline and, and, and, and, and… 

I’m thinking maybe a motorcycle would be a good compromise. We shall see.

A life.

Now that I’m working, this is not as much of a problem, but it still rears its ugly head once in a while. I need to go out more often, make more friends, date, and just generally interact with people. I need to learn the social skills that were denied me when I was younger.

My own home.

This has improved some. I now live only with my father in an apartment where I pay half the rent. We are on opposite sides of the living room, and we just generally don’t bother each other. It works out well, in my opinion, but I would like to try living alone one of these years.

My life has improved in some ways, but in others I’m just not going anywhere. Here’s to a new year, to the possibilities of change, and to independence.