Category: Personal Development

Social media is a great way to find out what everyone is thinking.

Unfortunately, it can show the dark side of people all too easily. Sometimes it is extreme and explicit, and sometimes it is subtle, but either way, people have a capability of being quite terrible.

They voice their anger and opposition about things that don’t impact them, and you might strongly disagree because it does impact you and your loved ones.

It can be painful at times, especially if they get personal. You can get riled up. You can get angry.

And there’s nothing wrong with feeling this way.

It’s just that it saps your energy so you can’t spend that energy on something better.

My friend Danyelle posts a weekly video called Wednesday’s Words of Wisdom in which she shares a quote and talks about how it resonates with her, and her video on July 15th was about letting go of outrage:

It’s one thing to be passive in the face of anger. It’s another to decide to spend your time on something with more consequence. People on Facebook or Twitter can easily share their opinions that no one asked for, and you don’t have to engage at their level.

Someone shares a hurtful meme? You might not even know about it because while they’re on Facebook posting something that people may or may not see, you’re setting a good example by your actions and making a real difference in the world.

It can be somewhat addicting to want to get into the anger and outrage debate, but when you look back in five years, are you going to be proud of the online arguments you participated in willingly, or are you going to be grateful you let those things go so you can spend your time making real progress in your life and the lives of others?

As a child, I internalized a lesson that is still with me today.

I learned not to rock the boat.

If I did something on my own, the repercussions were not always positive. Sometimes people got upset with me. Other times I was scolded.

For example, in school we were supposed to cut out our drawings of fruits and vegetables and glue them onto a cornucopia.

Well, I apparently wasn’t paying attention to how everyone else was doing it, and I did what made sense to me. I glued the paper so that it seemed as if the food was coming out of the side.

When the teacher saw what I was doing, she expressed concern, and she showed me what everyone else had done, which was gluing them on top in an abstract way.

I wasn’t in trouble, but I was singled out in front of everyone, and I didn’t like the feeling that I had inadvertently done something wrong.

And this same situation played out in a number of ways in school, at home, in relationships.

So I made a point of always trying to figure out what was the right thing to do so that I didn’t do the wrong thing.

Sometimes this is a good thing. For instance, in software development, I get asked to create a feature, and it’s easy to follow the spec and still end up with the wrong thing. It’s essential to ask questions and get clarification so you don’t waste anyone’s time.

But sometimes my seeking out the right thing slows me down. My approach to a particular situation might be perfectly fine, but I get this feeling that it’s suboptimal or that someone smarter than me might handle it different.

So then I don’t do it. I don’t volunteer my idea. I don’t take initiative. I don’t trust my own work will be good enough.

And not doing it means no one can be upset if I do it wrong. If the boat’s getting rocked, it’s not by me, so I can’t be in trouble.

Often I spend time looking into best practices to see how other people approach a particular issue. Sometimes there is a best practice, and sometimes there are opinions masquerading as facts.

But what am I really waiting for? Am I looking for approval from a secret society of experts who have figured out the One True Way?

Sometimes there isn’t a Right Way. There are often many ways, and just because someone is finding success one way, it doesn’t mean you should follow in their footsteps.

Sometimes there isn’t a way yet. There is no one to follow, and no one to say, “Yeah, go do that.” Anyone who has advice here would say, “No way! Don’t do that! No one does that! Here, follow this tried-and-true path.”

When I don’t have a resource that tells me exactly how to do something in a way I can easily understand, such as how to represent entities in a game, I worry I’m doing it wrong, or I’m doing it suboptimally, and it can cause me a lot of anguish.

I’m piecing information together and coming to new conclusions, and I don’t necessarily have someone at hand to let me know if I’m on the right track. I’m on my own, and I hesitate.

It’s as if I become afraid of someone’s disapproval, even if no one is there to do the disapproving but myself. I fear I’ll mess up badly even if the worst-case consequences are easy to recover from.

But these fears probably mean I’m growing and learning somewhere. So I push through the fear.

I rock the boat.

Because even though the lesson not to do so is still there, I internalized a new lesson as a grown-up:

I get to choose who to listen to, and I can trust myself.

Yesterday I wrote about my method of keeping my goals in front of me using a scoreboard. On my scoreboard are a number of metrics I track and set goals for, including game development hours.

I have a day job. I have responsibilities at home. I have a family. So how do I find the time?

My friend Mike Grosso, teacher and author of I Am Drums, recently posted a video responding to the question “How do you find the time to write?” which I found quite insightful:

Mike talks about not watching a single episode of Game of Thrones, choosing to spend his precious time elsewhere.

The thing is, most people don’t do this. They spend their time on Facebook, posting on their friend’s feeds, checking on clickbait, and viewing cat photos for potentially hours. They watch the latest season of Orange is the New Black or Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt as soon as it is available, binging on the content. They go out with friends. They hit snooze on their alarms instead of getting up right away.

None of these are bad things to do, and when your friends are involved, it’s easy to justify spending time with them. You don’t want to be out of the loop when everyone else is talking about who got killed in the last episode of The Walking Dead. You also don’t want to be a hermit or lose important relationships.

But everyone has the same 24 hours in a day. How you spend those hours is your choice.

Mike chooses to write, and he manages to finish novels as a result.

I learned early on that trying to squeeze in time for game development around the rest of my responsibilities isn’t sustainable. Because I see it as a priority, I set aside time specifically to work on game development.

Now it could be argued that I don’t make nearly enough time for it to be productive, but each person has their own priorities and workload, and I’m always adjusting mine as I find ways to improve my efforts. I cut activities and put off others in order to focus on higher priorities.

And sometimes they are temporary changes. I go to Team Trivia with friends every week, and for two months I stopped going so I could use those evenings to work on game development. Sometimes temporary hermit mode means you get stuff accomplished. And when you come back to society, you have something to show for it aside from being able to say, “Hey, I finished watching Parks and Recreation finally.”

Thanks for the concise reminder about prioritizing where you spend your time, Mike!