We all have good and bad attributes to our personalities. One that I have come to accept and lately embraced with myself is my laziness. I am beyond insanely lazy. In fact so lazy that I will not care to remember things people say or things I do unless I know for a fact I will need to use the knowledge within a short future. There is a reason my mom calls me like twice to remind me if we are going to do something on an appointed day.
I say that I embrace my laziness but that is not to say that I just accept that it’s there and that I have to live with it. It is not saying that I like it either, but that I have come to use it to what I believe is my advantage, and especially come to find ways to work around it. You could call it tricks to make myself less lazy. One of those tricks is using a calendar, but another more important trick is what I want to talk about in this post.
Diversity is a keyword in my life. I like to do many different things, see different places and have many different experiences as all people do. But diversity is the opposite of focus, which I believe is key to doing things efficiently and well. To lead a good life one needs diversity, to accomplish and achieve one needs focus. Diversity and focus ties in deeply with my laziness. Being lazy is clearly counterproductive to being focused, but it helps me to be diverse. Laziness breaks focus and allows me to pursue other interests, but it also forces my brain to be occupied by just the important things. As I said: the laziness makes me easily forget that which I don’t really care about.
The laziness thus brings up two clear disadvantages in my life. Sometimes I need to be very focused for long periods of time and sometimes I need to remember things that aren’t necessary to my immediate survival and happiness, like meeting with my mother or other recreational and social interactions. It makes me happy but my brain doesn’t always deem it important enough to remember.
The remedy for loosing focus was very hard for me to track down, but I think I have found it. I found it trough experiencing real pressure from school and work where focus is crucial. The solution, while taking around 20 years to find, is really very simple and can be expressed in the word Extremism. Do everything to the max. Need that report written? Spend 15 hours straight writing it. Now this sounds very much like the reasonings of a procrastinator, and in part it is. To me, procrastination and laziness are synonymous. The difference is that the word procrastination suggests that the task is not one the procrastinator wants to do. I want to do many things but am just too lazy to actually do them.
I’ll give you an example of something I would not have accomplished without extremism and that is not, in my definition, procrastination. I managed to exercise daily for three months in 2009 because I did it to the max, making a challenge of it and working out an hour a day. When I’ve tried working out before with the regular twice a week schedule I end up breaking the schedule and finally quitting after just a couple of weeks. My laziness sort of pushes it out of my mind and makes me forget that it’s important to me, effectively making it unimportant for me. Extremism makes me accomplish things I would otherwise not pursue at all.
People tend to call me disciplined recently, which spurred this post. If they could see the real me, the 13-14 year old Fredrik that still lives inside me, or just see my room, they would realize that discipline is the wrong term to use. I am anything but disciplined. When you see someone spending 12 hours in school 7 days a week, discipline is usually the word that comes to mind. Extremism is the word that comes to my mind. I just know it has to be done and the only way I can do it is to the extreme or it wouldn’t be done at all.
Extremism also helps out with diversity. I have tried combining school and work in an effective manor, but I can’t do it without starting to feel worn out and like I’m not producing good enough results in either thing. But by doing things to the max I’m able to finish one thing in half the time, way ahead of schedule so that I am subsequently focused on the second thing. Extremism makes me in this case be able to do two things instead of just one.
Extremism is what keeps my life going sometimes, shutting of my brain except the one part that needs to focus on the task at hand.
I could continue this post for another thousand words just defining the difference between extremism and discipline. But then no-one would read it, so I wont. I hope I’ve managed to get some sense across of what it is that makes me be able to stay focused even though I’m lazy, and that the laziness actually helps me to unfocus and live.
Extremism is what makes me tick, not discipline.
So I’ve decided to go to Japan. Now what?
First off I can just let everyone know that I’m going to be leaving Sweden at the start of July, so I will still be here for almost a half year more. There are some paperwork to be done but the institute through which I’m taking this education makes things quite a lot easier so it’s not that bad.
I said in my previous post that the whole thing was kind of scary; it is! I find that whenever I am moving forward and big changes are happening I’m a little scared. But it’s a good kind of scared. If you’re doing things right in life you should always have a small, small sensation in the back of your head that you might have taken on too much, that you’re changing too quickly, that kind of feeling. Progress is a little scary but you shouldn’t live without progress. Scary is good.
I will be leaving Sweden entirely for a year, the visa won’t allow me to leave Japan without going through a bunch of paperwork to get back in. This of course means that I’ll leave friends and family behind entirely, and I’m sure I’ll miss them. There’s not much to do about it though and it’s something that just has to be dealt with when the time comes.
Before I leave there are some things I want to get done, which leaves me unable to just completely phase out and dream about Tokyo for 5 months until the time comes; I suppose that might be a good thing. Stuff I want to do is get my motorcycle drivers license, I’ve been wanting this for over a year but last year it was hindered by Japan and work. My good friend Jonas has been living in the US for a year come summer and he’s planning a cross-country road-trip over this summer which I’d really like to join in on for a week or two. The plans will be released on his blog this Friday (the 12th) so we’ll see if there are any suitable points for me to get on and off the trip that would have me being there for the right amount of time in the beginning of June. Other than that, I obviously have 4 months of school left, and I’ll have to add some Japanese studies to my ordinary curriculum to be able to have a foundation to stand on when I get there.
All in all, I’ll be going to Japan, but there’s still a lot of stuff to do and to think about before I get there. It seems like a journey in itself.
I just worked out for and hour on my exercise bike while reading Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami. I have always found working out to be a great way to clear my mind.
While I was showering afterward I was thinking.
- “I have so many cool things I could do. There are so many awesome ideas to pursue and fun things to do. Why am I standing here in the shower instead of doing them?”
I am not entirely sure I can come up with a reasonable answer to that question.
January 25th,2010
Category | tags:
thoughts |
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I’ve been keeping quite busy the last couple of days. School takes up a lot but the little extra time I have I spend trying to make a little file upload demo in Cappuccino, which is really awesome. I love being able to code Objective-C and then just refresh my browser to see my application running in there instead of on the desktop.
Another very awesome thing is that I have now been officially approved as an iPhone Developer, meaning I can develop apps on my own phone and if they get good enough I can start selling them in the App Store. The entire application process took only 6 work-days which I have to say is very impressive! I’ve heard of people having to wait months for their licenses so that was pretty awesome. The first app up for development is essentially a phone version of DHG, which I hope can get quite awesome.
There is in fact so much awesome, that I can’t stop thinking about all of this awesome, resulting in me not getting any sleep. The upside of this is that it will result in tomorrow being very much less awesome and hopefully I’ll be able to get some sleep then.
I can’t wait till Christmas break when I’ll actually have some free time!
November 4th,2009 Uncategorized | tags:
apple,
iphone,
programming,
thoughts |
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This week I chose to experiment with my schedule. The project I work part-time on needed a bit more work this week. I haven’t worked the last 5-6 weeks because school took up too much of my time. School doesn’t take up just as much time right now (the last 4 weeks it’s been 10-15h per day in school) so I decided to work a bit now, but while I spend like 8 hours in school it is kind of hard to get home and work 2-4 hours after that.
To manage to do it at all and still have time to eat and read news and like, be human, I had to cut back somewhere. I decided to try to cut back on sleep.
As you might be able to tell from this blog post, a weeks worth of sleep deprivation haven’t exactly been good for me =P
The first couple of days it worked really nice and it felt awesome to get a couple more hours of awake-time each day. But now toward Thursday and Friday I feel pretty trashed.
The weirdest thing is that in high-school I usually didn’t sleep more than I did this week, quite often I slept less. A lot of weeks during high-school I got 4 or 5 hours of sleep on average and some days I didn’t sleep at all before going to school the next day. Sure I wasn’t 100% okay after one of those weeks back then either, but I’m sure I felt quite a lot better than I do now.
I’m getting old :/
October 30th,2009 Uncategorized | tags:
thoughts,
time-management |
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