(Good advice: pay yourself for your hard work) I have a
friend who was once told in a performance review at work that they
wouldn’t get a raise, but they were getting rewarded with ‘job
satisfaction’. If someone offers this ‘bonus’ to you as a work
incentive, feel free to steal an extra briefcase full of office
supplies, because your employer kind of hates you. You know what
makes work really satisfying? FAT PAYCHECKS. But I’m not throwing
the ‘job satisfaction’ idea completely out the window. One of the
steps of being successful in your work or craft is feeling like
there’s a reward attached to it. Our
brains are hard-wired to work
best when there is a treat dangling out there for us at the end of
a job. If you happen to work on a project or task that is entirely
self-motivated and created, however, you run into a problem. When
you are your own boss, there’s no external source of reward to spur
you on. So, you need to create a kind of internal currency that you
dole out whenever you finish work, like ‘pridebucks’ or
‘satisfaction rubles’. You have to come up with an intangible
reward system because (unless you’re rich) there’s not enough money
to buy a toy every time you succeed, and too many ‘yay for me’
cookies will make you fat and sad. Learn to recognize your own
accomplishments, and become comfortable with being proud of
yourself.
You need more year-end perspective. Take this!
Laziness is working against me even blogging in time for New Years, but here I am and off we go. New Years Eve! Not a big night for me, in terms of celebrations. I will be in bed and asleep well before midnight. I’ve never had great affection for New years eve parties, since it always felt like I was uneasily hanging around hoping to be surprised by a miraculously great year. But I won’t go so far as to say that it’s a meaningless evening.
The cynics, especially the ones who are love self-inflicted failure, look down on New Years as cliché, a night of empty promises that are quickly forgotten. And a lot of resolutions do get flushed away in January, because real change is devilishly hard to make stick. But don’t throw out the idea of the new year ritual.
Instead, start off by coming to terms with the idea of flexible success. If you look at your own progress in absolute terms, things start to look grim, so look at each challenge as a measure of your effort, and take pride in the learning that each attempt gives you. Keep trying.
This year taught me a lot of things (most of which are eluding me right now, because they think that’s funny). I learned more about being a good dad, about being a better writer, and a ton about putting honest effort into things. I think I’m starting to find my voice as a writer (another concept that sounded cliché and hackneyed until it happened to me), and I’m moving towards a more harmonious life.
As for resolutions, I aim to slightly improve across the board. I’ll get a little bit better at managing my time, make it to the gym a little bit more, put a little bit more effort into my personal grooming, do a little bit more cleaning during the days. Boring, I know, but that’s a side-effect from being pretty content. I don’t have a lot of monstrous vices lurking in the shadows.
So here’s to the New Year. Take it easy.
p.s. I think I broke my left pinky toe yesterday. It’s my first broken bone ever. Pretty anti-climactic. I wonder if I’ll even get it x-rayed?
Why don’t YOU try to come up with a witty title?
I can see the truth behind the stereotype of the worrying mom/grandmother force-feeding the young people around them (“Eat, eat. You’re skin and bones!”). The other parents out there will back me up on this: properly feeding a little human being is hard work. You have limited information from them about the state of their hunger, but that’s the easy part. The real challenge is dealing with an interlude of low appetite.
We all have a wide range of hungryness (how hungry we are at any given moment). Some days, I am the hungriest boy on earth, and woe betide the haunch of beef that lingers in front of my voracious gaze. But there are a few, infrequent days where my normal bowl of cereal is too much for me, and I don’t get hungry again until mid-afternoon. We don’t notice our own swings in appetite: we either shovel more in or eat a late meal. But when the diminished appetite belongs to the tiny life form you are responsible for keeping alive and healthy, it can turn you into a nervous wreck.
First you trot out the terrifying list of illnesses that can affect hunger. Then you scrabble around to remember the eating habits from the last few days, cursing your lack of attention. It’s very important at this point that you keep losing your mind and forget the wisdom from your peers and your doctor when they tell you that this is normal. Now you are in the right frame of mind to aggressively offer a buffet of food options.
When you regain your sanity, you remember that, two days ago, the little dude ate cereal, an orchard of apples, a hunk of roast pork, 3 pieces of bread, yogurt, cheese, and STILL ate 3 cookies for a bedtime snack. Don’t worry about one meal as long as they eat well enough over the span of a week.
Chris Loblaw, Author 