The battle within

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I plan. I constantly plan. I plan to the point where it becomes paralyzing for me to act when something doesn’t go according to one of many plans that I have. I don’t let myself flow down the river, but instead keep trying to hack my own way and work, sometimes against the current that is pulling me towards my destiny.

The battle within. Lately I’ve been trying to plan long-range what I want to do with my life. I’ve been having this recurring notion that I’m not seeing the forest from the trees, the same way I keep thinking I see alot of folks. People concerned with only today, what needs to be done today, what they need this week, what they would like to have soon… what about in a year? What about in ten years? What about long after they’re gone?

But what’s my problem? I think I have an opposite problem, where I plan and try to see too far into the future that I’m not seeing what’s going on now. How does the saying go? It’s not the destination, but the journey. Sometimes I feel I focus too much on the destination… sometimes, I focus on it so much that I forget what I need to do today. And even worse, I try to figure out what my next goal is, and I try to take a big piece of life and plan it out, just to end up nowhere because the piece is too big for me to handle, and I become paralyzed by my sense of failure that I can’t make heads or tails in my own life.

Why does it matter? At the core of my being I know all I want to do is help people. I want to help alot of people. Alot of people. I’m best at my job when I believe with every fiber of my being that what I’m doing makes a difference… I’ve seen it happen, where I will endure all kinds of difficulty to work for a cause that I believe in and want to see work… ask my uncle who took advantage of that personality trait of mine.

So what’s the alternative? My mom told me just a few days ago, “Don’t think too much about what you want to do later… it will come to you when the time is right.” That will definitely free up alot of my daily stress if I follow that advice… and probably will enable me to do what I’m supposed to do.

A few nights ago, I came to the conclusion that I would find work after this job, versus going to school full time. That’s what I want to do… I want to be a programmer. I can’t get a great coding job right out of this one, but I think if I had a while to get back into the game and programming again, I think I could pick it up. Then I could focus on doing good work, which will enable me to do more, like go to school.

Truly, the more I think about it, the more I feel that this is the right path. The million dollar question is, what do I want to study, and when I figure that out, can I get into a good school? I had a 2.4 GPA coming out of UCLA, so I have no idea what school out there would pick me up. Believe it or not, I think I am most likely to get into Harvard, simply because I know for a fact they interview everybody… I probably wouldn’t even get that far with other schools. I just have to look for other schools out there to maximize my options.

-TJ