I tend to write my posts by thinking about what I want to talk about or say. I then write the title, and proceed to record my rambling in the text box below.
This is probably the worst way to write anything, seeing as the title itself should be the summary of what was written, not vice-versa. As such, I haven’t been able to yet come up with a title, although I’m sure by the end of this one, there will be one that is appropriate.
So here it goes.
The day I turned 12 I joined something called ‘Sea Cadets’. It’s a youth group for people age 12-19 in Canada, that are interested in seamanship and the military.
I’m not quite sure if I was ever interested in those things before I joined. I think the main reason I did it was because my cousin was doing it, and everyone really seemed to love the fact that he had dedicated his time to something. I’d never wanted to go sailing, or have people yell at me, or learn how to polish boots, and iron a uniform. I never wanted to do any of those things prior to having done them. After a relatively short amount of time, friends and friends of friends joined cadets as well. This was great. I had someone to drive with, someone to have all these experiences with. The comfort of having a friend along for the ride wasn’t wasted on me in the slightest. But there was something more to it than that.
It was competition.
I now had something to prove, and prove I did.
I absorbed all the information I could. I read everything possible on seamanship, leadership, I volunteered for *everything*, joined all the teams, went to summer camp, all to enhance my status within the group. If I wasn’t the best at something, it killed me, and I beat myself up for it until I was. Quickly, I rose through the ranks among my peers, constantly driven by the parallel success of my friends, and constantly frustrated by my inability to get ahead. My inability to leave them behind and establish my dominance. But after rising to the top of the ranks and succeeding as much as possible I lost my motivation. Where was there to go from here?
What challenge was there? No matter how hard I tried I coudln’t get any further, so I abruptly quit, using my new girlfriend as an excuse.
Skip forward to college.
Now here was something that I hadn’t really decided on until the last minute. I had received acceptance letters from several universities for computer science, and math (dont ask me how the fuck that happened). College was my supposed to be my back-up plan.
One day I was sitting around on my computer when I received a phone call. It was from the professor of the program I’d applied for. He asked my why I wanted to attend the program and what I knew about the course itself. I had no goddamned clue.
(I had read through the description in about 5 minutes before a due date to apply at my high school)
He initially told me that I wasn’t a good candidate.
Me!
Nerd of Nerds!
‘Gigabyte-harddrive’
I’d spent *years* fucking around with unix and networking.
*I* wasn’t good enough for ‘Sheridan College’ ?
“Fuck that shit.”
And so it went. I convinced my future prof that I was ‘Sheridan Material’.
I moved to Oakville, a town that had absolutely zero appeal to me other than the fact that it housed my new pet project: Proving this asshole wrong.
I was good enough for this course, and I was going to be the best fucking telecommunications engineer ever.
I dove right in. I studed everything I could get my hands on. I mastered unix, spent hours sifting through manuals of communications hardware. I spent almost every night in my first year of college in front of a computer just to kick as much academic ass as possible. I aced it.
Every class.
A+
But it was all too easy.
After my second year of college I lost almost every shred of motivation I had.
The same thing that had happened to me before happened again. Patterns were repeating themselves.
I can excel at no matter what I’m doing, but I need to have some sort of motivating factor to keep pushing me. Something to keep me going. I lost that in telecommunications, not because I hated the course material – I rather enjoyed it. But because I found it ‘too easy’. After all, critical thinking is my thing, and all this or any other course I’d taken required was a minor amount of memorization, and a whole pile of critical thinking skills.
College quickly turned into a repeat of highschool: I attended class religiously, but I never paid that much attention. Course material was handed out and I never read it. Tests were prepared and I got another ‘A’, sprinkled with a few ‘B’s to taste. Where was the challenge? Where was my motivation? Where had it all gone wrong?
I no longer cared about impressing that prof. I no longer cared about *anything*.
My roommate and I started an empty beer bottle collection and we would play Halo until the sun came up. (We were the best Halo players on Xbox connect for about 4 months – look it up)
Nothing I did held any excitement for me except playing that game.
At the end of College one of my professors approached me with a job opportunity for a datacentre based in Toronto. I had been one of the chosen few (8 I think) to have interviews right out of college. Normally this wouldn’t have been any big deal. I’d seen my share of interviews by this time and they weren’t initimidating or challenging. I’d just turn on the charm, smile, drop a few technical terms and walk out with a job offer. No biggie. But everyone went and made a big deal about it.
“Wow! They must be fucking amazing!”
“All the top Telecom grads work there!”
“You have any idea how hard the interview is.”
“You’ll get this job Trev. You’ll get it. I wont.”
I got that job. But only because everyone else made a big deal about it. I didn’t even CARE about working there. All I cared about was beating them. These people that I’d come to call ‘Friend’. I loved seeing them fail, and I’m ashamed of that to this day.
I met some good people and made a couple really good friends, but the job itself wasn’t enough to keep me there. The hours were bad, I was physically suffering from that and a whole pile of other reasons, and I had to get out. Like any other job the novelty factor kept me going, but I didn’t care enough about it to stay, so I quit within 9 months. That’s all my competitiveness offered me.
I was convinced that I could start this same path in another country. It was so easy the first time. I didn’t even try! Another country would offer me a fresh perspective, genuine motivation. All the things I’d been lacking in the last 8 or 9 years.
Well things didn’t work out that way. I turned down job offers because I hated the idea of wearing a suit and tie to work. I even avoided finding a job for months because the idea of doing something I wasn’t devoted to made me sick. I spent my time wandering around another country trying to find something important. Finding something to motivate me was my new mission.
I tried reviving what I thought were old hobbies and curiosities, but all I got was dissapointment and a lifetimes worth of second-guessing. Things I thought I’d always wanted to do lack their vibrance, without the competitive motivation.
You see, I’ve spent the last 10 years trying to impress people that don’t care, that I’ve forgotten what I actually like.
So where am I now?