Yesterday’s Accomplishments

“Yesterday’s home runs don’t win today’s games.”
— Babe Ruth

It can be SO FRUSTRATING to learn an important lesson or find a particular slice of success… and then to wake up the next day with a clean slate and realize you have to do it ALL OVER AGAIN.

I’m one of those people who is THRILLED when faced with a new challenge, but DREADS doing anything tedious or repetitive. Simply put, I get really easily bored if I’m not constantly challenged, and having to do busy work is basically a slow death for me.

I do the busy, tedious work, of course — I own my own business and there’s a LOT of it to be done. But what really lights my fire is a new challenge, project, or creative endeavor.

I know being “easily bored” sounds like a luxury — like I have some kind of expectation that life needs to be entertaining and fun all the time, and that everything revolves around me. It also feels like pure privilege. And I really struggle with that. It helps if I focus on serving and putting others first, but it doesn’t truly eradicate the problem.

This tendency (if that’s what it is) made both school and the workplace incredibly difficult for me — I would conquer a new project, strategy, or procedure and get hungry for the next one… only to find that I was expected to simply repeat what I had just done over and over again, either for grades or for money.

I’m embarrassed to say that I got so frustrated during one particularly repetitive task (**cough cough** taking the SATs, a standardized test we are required to take here in the United States) that halfway through, I simply… stopped. I sat there, looking at the bubbles on the paper, my brain incomprehensibly thrashing and rebelling within my skull. I could not make myself finish taking it.

Work was similarly frustrating, and it’s one of the reasons I will never be able to work for anyone else again. I wanted to solve hard problems and innovate. But employers don’t want creativity or innovation (even though they often SAY they do). They want you to sit quietly at your desk, do your busy work, and not make a ruckus.

Which is something I cannot do.

I feel like this post has gone slightly off the rails, but it’s all related. Sometimes, no matter how hard our ego rebels, we have to do the same things over and over again. We have to re-learn lessons we thought were learned, and rewrite drafts we thought were done. We have to take out the trash every Sunday night. We have to wash the same dishes every time we use them.

Life goes on. The credits don’t roll once you’ve accomplished something. The truth is you have to keep going, and keep moving forward — even when it feels like you’re standing still.

Words & warmth,

Sarah