For most of my life, I’ve had a pretty disfavorable relationship with productivity. As a kid I was a lazy, dismotivated, never-crastinator. I seldom completed my homework, coasting by with mostly passable grades due to good test taking. I wouldn’t do my chores, racking up punishments for weeks. Despite an exhaustion that I experienced nearly every day, I couldn’t get myself off the computer and into bed until the small hours of the night. My first semester in college, I got such poor grades that I was placed on academic probation.
“You’re so smart; I know you’re capable of doing better.” My mom told me. “Sometimes you just have to sit down and get a thing done,” my dad told me.
My dad ran his own company and my mom was a math and science teacher. Being naturally driven, self-motivated, and organized people, they didn’t know how to help me. I’m not sure they even believed me when I told them that I really did want to do my homework, and to go to sleep early. But none of the advice seemed to help me improve. Nothing I did seemed to break the cycle of procrastination. I felt like a failure.
Tsuyoku Naritai ( 強くなりたい ) means “I want to become stronger.” The Tsu is pronounced like the last phoneme of the word cats. Cats. Catsu. Tsuyoku. The R in Naritai is trickier. Think of the way you pronounce a soft t (or T-flap, for you linguistics nerds) in the word water or letter. Nari. Naritai. Tsuyoku Naritai.
Like I mentioned, I desperately wanted to become stronger. But nothing I tried solved my problems. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I gravitated towards Japanese media which, as Eliezer Yudkowsky famously wrote, “Embodies the spirit of Tsuyoku Naritai more intensely than in any Western literature.” One of my favorite things was the Pokémon anime. In the early episodes of the show the main character Ash oversleeps, struggles to catch Pokémon, and fails in understanding even the basic principles of a Pokémon type match up, sending in Electric type Pikachu against a fully resistant ground type in his first big match. Over the course of the series however, he catches more Pokémon, wins more battles, and finally learns how to use strategy to choose the best Pokémon for the match.
It was undoubtedly cathartic for me to see Ash Ketchum grow from a flailing disaster child to a somewhat competent Pokémon Trainer. Perhaps it gave me hope. Or maybe I just liked the cute monsters and the badly translated puns.
Fast forward a number of years. I was thinking of applying to programming bootcamp. During a phone call with my mom, I expressed my worries: I did so poorly in school, collapsing under the workload. How would I manage in a rigorous bootcamp environment?
To my complete surprise she replied, “Honey, I should have said it more often but I’m so so proud of you. When you were facing dropping out of college, you turned things around and graduated. I was way too hard on you because of my own mindset and I really regret it.”
Like a seismic tremor, my foundation of self-image was shaken, as the entire way I had framed my academic abilities seemed to flip in that moment. Could it have been true that I actually did quite well in school? Were there some beliefs about how far I ought to have progressed, or what skills I ought to have mastered that were making me miserable?
I called my dad to talk about the bootcamp idea. He too, was confident I could do it. “Most people overestimate what they can do in a day,” he said, “and underestimate what they can do in a year.”
I think that was my problem. Each and every day, I saw myself undershoot my goals. I had this firmly held image of success and what that would be like, and every day that didn’t fit that description was a failure.
Fueled by the newfound belief in my ability to succeed, and my plan to measure my progress over months not days, I launched into my work. I set intermediate checkpoints along the way to keep myself on task. I gave myself permission to write code sitting sideways on a couch, and I finally taught myself how to say no to requests for my time and energy.
And as of last week, I have graduated from my full stack programming bootcamp in San Francisco, Hackbright Academy.
And so I think I can say with confidence, looking back over my entire life, that I am longer quite the flailing disaster child I used to be. (Even though I still have a ways to go ;) )
So, do not let a thought like “I’m not strong yet” or “I didn’t do enough” color your perception of your journey. You may not see it, but every day that you don’t give up is the practice of tsuyoku naritai, (“I want to become strong.”) And trust me, you will definitely become strong. “Zettai tsuyoku narimasu.”
edit