Confessions of a Geek

During spring break I had an odd experience. I found all four of my high school student ID cards, complete with my school picture from each year. When I showed them to a few friends, they all remarked on how little my face has changed since then. For reference, the picture I use on the front page of this website is a high school senior picture, nearly four years old. Not only do I look pretty much the same now as I do in that picture, even my freshman year picture looks about the same. So over the course of seven or so years, it seems that my appearance—or at least my face—hasn’t changed that much. Oh well.

Fast forward a week or so, and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about an entirely different subject: life goals. As it turns out, I don’t have a ton of them. Sure, I have the overall goal of pursuing a career in the field I love, computer science. And to achieve that, I’m getting a college degree. But to be quite honest, that’s not a hard goal for me to have. That’s not to say that the task of getting a degree is easy. But for most of my life, going to college and having a career has been a central part of how I imagine my life. Computer programming became such a passion of mine in high school that it was easy to integrate into this vision. So of course this is an easy life goal for me to have.

Additionally, the task of achieving this goal doesn’t really push me to improve myself. Throughout my life, academics have been easy to me, probably because I’m a curious person, I like learning new things, and yes, probably due to some amount of aptitude. I’m no genius, and grades don’t magically come to me without effort. But taking classes, learning course material, doing projects, and taking exams are all routine for me. I’m well equipped to achieve these tasks. I’ve been doing them for years, and while they still challenge me, they don’t push my boundaries or force me to improve myself. Taking a look at my life right now, I don’t have goals that force me to do these things because, let’s be honest: those things are uncomfortable.

I guess I have at least one of those three great virtues of a programmer: laziness. In the task of graduating and having a career, I’ve (at least subconsciously) made the judgment that I don’t need to improve myself too much to achieve my goal, and therefore, to do so would be extra energy expended. But that perspective is not OK. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I realize the horror of waking up some morning in the future, looking at my old college student ID, and realizing that I haven’t changed since then. Not realizing that my face looks the same, but instead, realizing that I’m the same. Still few life goals, still the same flaws in my personality, health, skills, and discipline. It’s becoming clear to me that my perspective has been wrong. It’s not about achieving a career with the minimum energy expenditure. It’s about expending the greatest amount of energy possible to make myself the best person I can be.

This probably sounds platitudinous and obvious. And maybe it is. But as the result of some serious introspection, it means a lot more to me than just the words. I’m probably not the lazy lump I’m making myself out to be, but I’m definitely at a plateau, and I’ve lost sight of what it means to improve myself. Rather than subjecting my future self to that horrible realization of stagnation, I’m changing my outlook now. I’m setting goals and outlining concrete changes I can make to my life right now. Every decision should be made with the question, “how will this help me achieve my goals?” This isn’t something that will be simple, comfortable, or at all in my wheelhouse. And it’s not a conclusion I should be congratulated for realizing—nothing has happened yet. I’ll just have to rely on self-discipline, and the promise that one day, time will prove me right. One day, I’ll look back on my college student ID and be embarrassed about who I am now, because of the person I’ll have become by then.

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