Journal of Life

If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools

I have experienced a moment that will change my life forever. This moment was a very profound, spiritual, intimate and reflective event. I feel like I left the Iron Ring Ceremony as a different person than the one that entered.

Yesterday, I was greatly honoured to have participated in The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer, a century old tradition in Canadian Engineering. The Ritual (also known as The Iron Ring Ceremony) is a significant time in an engineers’ life. At this time, the young engineering graduate becomes a qualified member of the profession. An important step, but what really touched me was the symbolism of the moment.

The ideals of an engineer encompasses many virtues that I hold in high regard. These virtues include honesty, integrity, reliability and a responsibility to society. I value an awareness of our society and respect those who contribute to it. I understand meaningful relationships and know that we can only advance as a race if we give more than we take. In our current state, I believe that there are a disproportionately small number of people who make the greatest contributions back to society. I believe that the volume of value given by the great contributors exceeds the value taken by others. Integrity, strength of character, is embodied in self assuredness and applied in the engineers’ every decision. Honesty is removing the guise that your pride places on your mind and representing entirely candid thoughts and feelings. One must possess high integrity to be genuinely and eternally honest since one must trust themselves before others will offer their trust. Reliability is a strength of character so strong that it stands through diversity, disaster and time. Rudyard Kiplings’ voice gives words to these ideals in the above quote.

Kevin Bailey, a man that I have known for quite some time, and a person that I believe represents these virtues placed the symbolic ring on my finger. In that moment, I felt a wave of pride wash over me. I knew that moment was the beginning of the rest of my life. My character has been ever slowly evolving and this symbol unites my virtues with my character. The ring feels like a piece of my integrity, an ageless memento of commitment to myself.

My life did change in that hour. Eternally, for the better.

The timing of this day was perfect. I have passed through several important stages of questioning my moral character, leading up to the ceremony. You do not need to wait for a significant event to reflect on life and change your personality. It is never too late to be the person you want to be. Take the opportunity now and the next hour will change your life.

If you read my most recent posts, you’ll notice I keep bringing up this notion that I need to save the world. The amount of space this value has taken on my posts is not only disproportionate to my desire, but is also poorly thought out.

Lately, my mind has been broken. I’ve been reviewing some of the posts that I wrote when I first started this blog, and realize how clearly I was thinking then. What factors affected my ability to think clearly and how can I replicate that state? At the time I was spending evenings alone, I was eating well, getting regular exercise and sleeping about 9 hours a night. I never skipped a meal. I felt refreshed and awake when I woke up every morning. I was living in a beautiful place with moderate weather, right on the pacific ocean. Now that I think about it, my mind was never clearer.

Since I’ve been back at school, my mind has slowly been reduced to mush. I started strong, but the stress, responsibilities and time constraints have been slowly wearing me down. I get an average of 7 hours sleep and I regularly miss meals. I certainly do not eat a regular healthy meal. I still play sports, but my focus is much more competitive. In a metaphorical sense, I am always on.

This discussion is leading to several well known problems that are characteristic of our western society. These are the issues of time management and work-life balance. I see these both as being the same problem, since work-life balance is how you manage the time that you are given.

As I am nearing the end of my academic career, I realize that my style of time management is not well organized. I know that I have a short attention span, and I have a tendancy to divert my attention quickly, often too quickly. It is difficult for me sit and focus on the same task for extended periods of time. I think of my mind as having a thought capacity. My thought capacity changes from time to time, but my mind is always running at capacity. Should I begin to lose thought on the task at hand, my thoughts begin to wander. In this way, my mind as always able to maintain thought capacity. Like nearly every other describable human character trait, my wandering attention is both a blessing and a curse.

Can I be productive while changing focus regularly? I can, but I need to get a feeling for the best time to switch between tasks. I need to set goals, especially smaller goals, and conquer them one goal at a time. I need to follow my own advice on squashing procrastination.

I need to recognize when my thought capacity is reduced, when I am not thinking clearly. I need to learn to adapt according and find a way to return to my best self.

As time passes, my thoughts and time are moving towards building a sustainable business. My discussions with like-minded friends have lead me to consider who I am, my dreams, goals and motivations. I realized, not too long ago, that my dream was to take an entrepreneurial route to my career. I understand now that I need to put into my goals and values into words.
I do dream of making an important contribution to a cause that I believe in, but this is just a means to an end. The reasons I have for confronting the world delve into the realm of martyrdom.

I believe that I have a gift. A valuable and significant gift. I believe that this power I have within me cannot be realized without the opportunity. I have worked at several large companies. I have allowed others to manage both my time and my mind. To be honest, it felt great contributing to a team and given the occasional sensation that my effort was making a difference. It is a great feeling to be able to help another. This feeling is dear to me from my days as a ski coach. When you look into that fourteen year old’s eyes after a tough race, where they proved to themselves how amazing they really are, you get the warmest fuzzy feeling you could imagine. I have never felt so important, so significant, as I did in that moment. That said, if I were to devote my time to one of these large well-established companies, that would be the only time I would get that feeling. I would never get the satisfaction of knowing my strength had made a real societal impact.

Am I really this selfless? I have been known to put on a sarcastic, condescending or even disgusted face, but deep inside of me lurks this value. I am intensely frustrated by the endless amount of needless suffering this world endures. I am emotionally distressed by the thought that thousands of years of human advancement was lost when Rome was toppled by the barbarians. I cannot just watch the human race underachieve. I need to do whatever I can to improve the lives of current and future societies.

I have the passion. I embody the word ambition. I have confidence in every breath. I will fight every fight I reasonably believe that I can win, to the bitter end. I have an unfilled void in my life and I cannot sleep soundly until I can watch society realize its potential.

The pragmatist in me tells me that I am going to have problems in this role. I know that I cannot be perfect all the time. I am going to make mistakes. There are going to be decisions that I regret. There are going to times when I am not going to be able to find the right words. There are going to be times when I struggle with my shortcomings. I am worried that I will lose sight of the goal. It scares me to think that I might lose my ambition. I feel that as long as I stay true to myself and my values, I will be able to rise and overcome any challenges I may face. I also realize how cliche that sounds, but it is exactly how I feel.

I am going to experience many exicting times and many trying times. This experience is going to push me to all of my limits. I want this to be the most challenging and most rewarding time in my life. Above all, I want to be able to look back and know that I put all my effort into the most valuable cause I can think of. I want to know that I did the best I could. If I always stay true to myself, make the best decisions I can and give everything I have, I will never have regrets.

This post is the second in a several part series on better understanding myself. If you have not yet read part one, you may want to go back and do that now.

I have provided some insight into the person I want to be. Many people feel that the characteristics one prizes is the best way to describe a person because what you dream will become a self fulfilling prophecy. I am more pragmatic than that. I understand that people are going to lean towards dreams. A dream is also a dream and not always achieveable. A ideal might influence a decision. In life, there are many factors that are considered before reaching a conclusion. Not all decisions are going to follow a persons’ ideals. Descibing prized characteristics can only formalize a small subset of the complicated interactions that influence the mind.

I am going to run off on another tangent, to describe a subtle but meaningful fact. The process of understanding who you are is simply enumerating the factors that influence your decisions. Whether those factors are experiences, ideals, values, morals, trust, confidence, rules or influence. Think about it. Every decision that you make, or do not make, descibes the very essence of you. I have chosen to contemplate philosophical life issues in my blog. I chose not to read about applied methods of software validation. I chose not to spend time with my friends. I chose not to live in the United States. I chose against devoting my every waking hour to reduce the impact of major complications affecting every lifeform in the known universe. Every decision I make, is also a decision that I am not making. Those decisions define me.

Back from the tangent, I am going to attempt to descibe who I am. I am going to try to decipher the other factors that influence my decisions. Here we go.

From all my past experiences, the memories that I am the most drawn to are those when I was appreciated. Appreciation is the only measure available to judge the value and direction of my impact. While using appreciation as a measure might work, it is a very pragmatic viewpoint. Appreciation is a source of motivation, one of the most powerful I have found. At the risk of appearing snobbish, I feel that I have been under-appreciated considering my many accomplishments. I understand the importance of recognizing accomplishments and giving praise when praise is due. I feel that our culture grossly under-appreciates the efforts of others. Unless, abstaining the younger generation from praise is a plan to ensure human perseverance and productivity in the future. Consider this angle. If society only gives praise to significant accomplishments and we recognize that acceptance, praise and appreciation are basic human incentives, then people will always push to achieve significance. Children will grow to be the best that they can be. Individuals will try harder to reach the goal. We can condition society to advance itself. This leaves a great burden of quality of life with the education system and the body that controls education. I think this is much bigger question and I will save it for another post.

I am cynical, inquisitive and generally untrusting. I have trust issues, I have since I was young. The first time my trust was betrayed, I began generalizing that I could not trust anyone. I attribute this decision to many problems I had in my life, including an underdeveloped level of respect and lack of social skills. I did give-up on others too quickly but it did result in an independent and clever (albeit paranoid) little boy. I was the cliche anti-social teenagers-are-mean story. Although I enjoyed sports, I had confidence issues and believed that I could not compete. I was not going to be bothered with an activity that I was not ever going to be good at. Instead, I tried to escape my life by watching television and playing countless hours of video games. I needed slow steps to break out of the shell I had surrounded my feelings in. Luckily, I did have at least one person I felt I could trust. My best friend, who continues to be a good friend, was able to show me the light. We spent a lot of time together. I became good friends with the friends he made at school. I started branching out, playing sports, participating in gatherings other than school and the couch in front of the tv. I grew more confidence as I was able to prove my own self worth. It was an amazingly empowering feeling. I got deeply involved in alpine skiing only a few years after I learned to make my first turn.

I am heavily pragmatic and realistic. I am always analyzing a question based on how it applies to the world we know. I am competitive. I never back down from a challenge. I could go on explaining my personality, but I have a better way. I took a personality test, which involved answering a set of questions about the types of decisions that I make. This test classifys personalities into sixteen different categories. Fortunately, my personality type (INTJ) describes me to a tee.

Being able to describe myself is not a simple, or short topic. In fact, if you’ve been following, I have been describing myself through my thoughts since the first post. This topic, I’m hoping will have some flow to it, so I decided to split it into several posts.

I believe in taking two approaches to better understanding myself. The first is to seek help from others. The second is to carefully consider who I am. These two approaches should be very disconnected. Who I am to other people or how I am perceived. Who I believe I am or who I want to be. I am hoping that the combination should give a rounded description of Adam.

As I try to put myself into words, I find it difficult to use words based on examples, without recalling conflicting counterexamples. I feel that I should focus on the person that I want to be instead of the person that I am. I hope there is little disjoint between the responses to those questions, but am certain that there is. As I grow and change as a person, there will always be differences.

I want to make a significant and valuable contribution to society. This value is relatively novel to me. I believe that it formalized when I was considering what part of endeavours I have engaged in was the most important to me. One of the most important experiences in my life was the opportunity to become a coach for young athletes aspiring to be alpine skiing superstars. I had many reasons to be a coach but the most significant was that I was able to contribute value to their young lives, the future of the sport and Canadian nationalism. My value in philanthropy has only grown. I read news from all over the world regularly and study the principles of economics. I understand how unhappiness is spread over the world, how many problems people deal with on a daily basis, how unproductive lives are, and that I can make a difference. I feel that the impact that I can have is limited only by my own ambition.

I want to be a person of high integrity. I want to be trusting, trustworthy and dependable. I have strong moral values that need to be exhibited. This is not the person that I have always been, and I realize that fact. Over time, I have come to realize that integrity is the most important characteristic a person can have. A person with integrity is confident, honest and secure with their character. A person with integrity understands themselves, and can make sound judgments as a result. A person of integrity can weather the raging storms of life with a strength that is derived from themselves. A person of integrity supports and empowers those around him.

On the road to graduation and lurching closer to a plan for post-graduation, I have hit a wall. I feel fortunate that the wall is not a lack of directions, but partly an abundance. I find myself trying to explain who I am and why I am here and where I am going. I realize that I have spent very little time contemplating these deep but fundamental questions. I understand that it will always be difficult to progress, to make the next decision, unless I can rationalize and express the principles that define me.

The thought had occurred to me in philosophy class, actually. There is a school of great thinkers in philosophy who spend countless hours considering what it means to be a person. Not human, but a person. Here is a start: They must be human. They must display creativity and intelligence. They must exhibit emotion.

Simple, right? In fact, those factors answer the question of what it means to be human. What makes you who you are? The biologist will tell you that it is your DNA and the organization of neurons in your brain. But, that’s still answering the same question. The Mind Body problem is an open question in philosophy, and it boils down to understanding the connection between the mind and body. How do you have consciousness? Is soldier lying in a coma in the hospital a person? What if a child is born into a coma?

While I do not feel responsible to solve a problem that has challenged society for centuries, it does lead to the question who am I? I have actually been considering this question for quite some time, originally hoping to stereotype myself into a group to which I rightfully belonged. This was High School, as I am sure that most people experience, everyone tries to define themselves. Their friends, their family, their grades, their popularity, their affiliations and activities. You all knew people who could be described by one of the following stereotypes: Jock, Prom Queen, Geek, Loner and “Friendly”. Since that delicate period in my life, I have grown older and wiser. I have realized that no matter how you define yourself, you will never truly conform to any stereotype. The real value is the path to finding yourself; your life. Ancillary to that realization is you can re-invent you as many times as you like and each description becomes a part of you.