Does seeing a good movie ever really make you want to go out and gorilla-produce your own masterpiece? We watched Wall-E tonight and it kind of had that effect on me, although it also made me wish I could work on computing problems that would yield something as cool and as tangible as a feature film. While I work at a cool place, I don’t often feel truly connected to the cool stuff that we do. There’s two ways to look at that: I’m stuck in a backwater or I’m not trying hard enough to get involved.
That comes back to one of those “two kinds of people” generalizations: there are those that let things happen to them, and those that make things happen. No one can truly be completely one way or the other; even really passive people find food, and the most assertive/agressive people I know still pay taxes, but there are ways to polarize both of those things. “I don’t know, what do you want to eat?” is a common refrain around my home, so it’s probably obvious with which group I tend to hang.
Knowing how much pressure to apply is something I struggle with constantly. There may be things I really want, but there’s also trying and pushing too hard. I often find myself being aggressive-passive, forf lack of the right term; I’ll push really hard to start something and then lose interest or energy shortly after I get started. Unfortunately, I’ve gotten good enough at it that I manage to build up enough momentum at first that I can coast through. That can appear really annoying to others because it makes it seem like everything comes easily to me. Building up that initial momentum is hard and takes a lot out of me, so I naturally want to fall back to my passive state right afterwards. Of course that also means I end up disappointed — no one ever gets all of what they want by having a great start, a tepid second act, and a phoned-in ending.