stevie.

Holy crap. I was just rooting through my Tumblr posts and found this un-published gem from May 8th, 2010 7:08pm.

Good advice, past me.

For Mother’s Day, my mom asked me to tidy the residual stuff I’ve left in her house. After sleeping in and watching a few too many episodes of Jerseylicious (I know; I have a problem.), I hoisted myself off the couch and started to take inventory. Of course, it wasn’t long before my old tricks caught up with me. Instead of tackling the growing piles of clothes or moving the boxes left clumsily in the middle of my room, I started a job that might take hours, but whose results no one but I would notice: I opened one of the boxes, full of school papers from high school and college in no particular order, and started to comb through it.

I’ve always been interested in teachers’ comments, but while I was in school, it was hard not to see the grade as the bottom line. I got As and was satisfied. Upon looking at them again, without a GPA on the line, the common message struck me much more as a criticism than it had before:

Your points are strong, but you need to follow through on the analysis.

After I graduated, when I told my thesis advisor that I was interested in editing, she gave me the same double-edged feeback. She told me that although many academics are more concerned with data than writing, I can help them because I have the opposite issue: I lack data and conclusions, but I always remember that I’m telling a story.

I feel like this goes on in all aspects of my life. I get lost in the details and forget about results. I spend time trying to come up with an efficient system and reasonable goals, and I try to make meaningful connections between the things I attempt, but for what? I haven’t done any research or started my compost pile or blogged about my cake-scapades. The small things I have accomplished recently (moving out of my parents’ house, studying for the GRE, posting more regularly) are motivated by the joy I get from doing things with other people, but without a partner, each of those endeavors would have fallen easily from my attention.

Of course, I’m thinking right about now, I’m so neurotic. I should stop publicly over-analyzing myself. Nobody cares. Luckily, I just interrupted myself with the idea that this may speak to a larger cultural problem.

Members of the millennial generation (Google it. I couldn’t find anything worth linking to at the moment.), born roughly between 1983 and 2003 (that’s us!), grew up in an America that was very pro-child, pro-teamwork, and pro-structure. Kids tended to spend their days in supervised activities and receive constant positive reinforcement from parents and teachers. Is it that surprising that I feel most accomplished when I schedule certain activities on certain days of the week and when I have someone to high-five once we’ve put in our time and we’re ready to go home? No. What scares me is the idea that I can’t or won’t accomplish anything by myself or for myself. The possibility of such an accomplishment is only getting slimmer and less convenient. We (or at least I) live in a world of sharing, liking, commenting, and reblogging. Satisfaction comes less from completing a project and more from showing the world a tiny piece of a snapshot of what you’re doing, thinking, or, well, being… and getting confirmation in your inbox that someone noticed. Continuing beyond that takes a different kind of motivation.

In the spirit of following through, I challenge you (and me!) to look past these lower thresholds of accomplishment. So this little box is impeccably organized. So you made the deadline and got the A. So you stimulated some fun Facebook discussion among your friends. I really believe that human beings act in order to make their worlds and their lives better, and though these small milestones do make us feel better, imagine what would get done if we told ourselves that that wasn’t better enough. Maybe we would move beyond those external motivators and really be inspired to accomplish something worth noticing.