I guess I’m just lazy and rather have fun then to do work. I’m an hedonistic person. I want instant gratification in whatever I do and I just haven’t made that leap to thinking about the future. Well I mean sure I think about it like what I’m am going to do for the rest of my life and how I will achieve it. I think everyone thinks about these things every now and then but I just haven’t connected the dots.
I get my stimulus from playing handball when it isn’t too cold or I go play pool with my best friend. Those give me my instant gratification. The feeling of doing that awesome kill in handball or making a hard cut shot into a pocket in pool. Those things give me motivation because I get that boost of adrenaline. Now that its getting colder I’m going back to video games. I’ve been an avid gamer for years and I’m good at what I do which is first person shooter. I have many friends that are good and fun to be with in a game and its just hard to say no to them when they ask me to join their game. It feels good to be good at something and to be with friends.
Believe it or not I also enjoy learning. I’m loving my anthropology and math classes. But the way I learn also feeds my bad habits. People learn differently and I learn by listening and watching what the teacher does and says. I rarely if ever copy notes and if I do Ill probably get only a little more then half of what I would get from just sitting there quietly and paying attention. Because of that, writing suffered dramatically. I never wrote anything and my grammar was always horrendous. Learning the rules of how to write properly just confused me even more so I never bothered. But homework was never really like “watch this youtube video and we will discuss it in class”. I’d do that H.W. every day and learn something from it if it was but sadly it never happened that way.
I realized I should conform to how things work in an institute like Baruch but I never felt the need to in High school so I never did. Paying attention in class and getting high grades in test meant little to no work at home which gave me the freedom to do whatever. Having that much freedom is intoxicating to say the least. It’s hard to let go a way of life you lived for most of your life.
Sometimes things just happen to slowly. Handball when you play a good game, the ball moves fast and my reaction time gets better and faster. Picking up a fast kill meant reacting to it before it hits the wall and getting into position. The pace of the game makes me love it. This carries over to games. There is games like RPG (Role Playing Games) that just bore the hell out of me. Everything is slow and the build up is slow. Shooting games gives me fast pace feeling when my reaction to seeing the enemy is everything. In school, everything is slow. So far I had one exam in math class. I haven’t paid attention nor did any H.W. for it for a good couple of weeks so obviously I’m behind. But all I did was skim through the notes for a good hour and paid attention the class before the exam to catch up and I got an 80 on the test. I came from a school where 80 was good enough and the way I see it, I probably didn’t need to skim through my notes for that hour if I paid attention in every class but one class was 100 minutes. Things just don’t move fast enough for me to care. Not saying I’m a prodigy and I will get things instantly and of course this pace is still faster then the pace in my high school.
More or less to rap it up, I’m a hedonist. I need my instant gratification so I have the motivation to continue. If I don’t get it, I lose motivation and quit before I even start. I’d think about doing something and calculate when I will receive my reward. I realize the reward is bigger and much more valuable then having an adrenaline rush in sports or games but right now, I just don’t feel it.
