luck Archives - Author K. Williams

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Topic #94

What’s Your Motto For Life?
What words of wisdom do you live by?

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Hmmm…Putting words to my philosophy takes some thinking. I think that is the moment you find the plot holes in your story, and it doesn’t quite lend to as much free thought as you’d like. The brain loves to protect it’s worldview. I’ll do my very best.

Keep going. And, it will be over soon. Those are the things that I tell myself through hardships. They are the words of wisdom that I developed in my teens and twenties, and words that stick with me today. I’m aware that they reveal a great deal about my life, giving a definite taste of what is written back there.

I think Keep Going would be my motto. For a real long time, I had to put my nose to the grindstone and just work hard and wait for things to resolve if they ever would. Getting respect for my work, whether that is my writing or in my day job, has always been very difficult. There is no explanation to give on that, except maybe that I am a young woman, and my expertise is considered to be lacking just because of gender. Performing at 200% is the norm for me. It’s exhausting. But, I keep going. There is no other choice when you are determined to achieve. Keep going.

It will be over soon was born from fears. Whenever I got sick or needed a procedure done, I would face it with trepidation. None of us likes to be laid low. So, I would coach myself to not worry and these were the words that carried me through those moments. It has echoed into other areas, such as while working a job I had felt stagnated in, or where things had gotten difficult to the point of utterly hating the job. I remember sitting in a room with other candidates to be tested on our typing skills. I had been doing data entry for 6-7 years, and was chatting with friends online, so there should have been no fear of failing. Still, my hands shook. I told myself to keep going, and that it would be over soon. I passed, well above the minimum, but still well below my actual speed.

We are each given a limited amount of time on this Earth. Knowing this will all be over soon helps you to focus better on continuing forward, and use the energy of the urgency from that knowledge in the harder times. Paradoxically, I can see how this philosophy could lead to overworking. If you just keep going, can you go too hard? I think you can, and that’s why you have to be honest with yourself and the things around you. Analyzing the things that create obstacles and your emotions toward them is quite healthy, and should be undertaken frequently.

Not too long ago, I got caught up in thinking I wasn’t working hard enough to achieve my goals, failing to see that I had already achieved a good number of them. There was awareness of the accomplishment, but not the appropriate level of acknowledgment to its importance, and not enough emotional investment in it to make me stop and recognize what was happening. When you jump from accomplishing a goal straight into how can I do it better, you forget to take a moment to bank the win, and your brain glosses right past it, an attitude of that wasn’t really it because it wasn’t good enough or exactly how I imagined things coming out. So, you keep going, feeling like you’ve not done a thing. The sense of inadequacy creeps in, and you start resenting others who appear to be achieving your goals as easy as pulling them down from a supermarket shelf.

Firstly, you can’t compare yourself to others, because the dynamics are always different. Also, you have no idea about what is happening in the background with them. And, sometimes, people just get lucky. It doesn’t mean you’re doing things wrong or not working hard enough.

Secondly, celebrate your wins because this will be over soon. Don’t wait to recognize what you’ve accomplished, because you don’t know how long you’ve been allotted. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to do better next time, but don’t forget that you already did it once. Failure to do so can keep you going along the same path as before, and that doesn’t help you get better by analyzing what did and didn’t work. Besides, what worked last time may not work at all next time. Life is not like a rigidly framed video game. The options are endless.