(No, this entry is not about David Carradine.)
Along with being driven, I'm also impatient.
When I first started exercising, I felt anxious to get to where I wanted to be. In August 2007, I was 215 pounds, and I wanted to be 160 right then and there. But I knew at a rate of one pound a week, it would take about a year to get within striking distance of that goal. I didn't want to wait, but I had to. My anxiety subsided by the end of September, when I registered a 10-pound loss. By October, my pants were falling off my waist.
When I started recording vocals for my demos, I hated how terribly everything came out. The recordings clipped, I was out of tune, and the sound was dull and dead. I knew it would take years — especially when I could only do any real work during vacations — before I could turn out vocals I didn't hate. Along the way, I learned the ins and outs of my pitch-correction plug-in, and I invested in a number of effects processors that got me the sound I want. Now, I don't mind hearing my own voice so much. (I still think I suck as a singer, though.)
When I felt the urge to leave my very first job, I knew I couldn't do it without some serious retraining. I had wanted to quit in 1999, but I held myself back from doing anything rash. I took classes in scripting in late 1999 and delved into coding my first web sites in 2000. It paid off when I finally was hired first as a web engineer — someone who could stick static content within dynamic scripts — then eventually as a web software developer. I've now been a web developer longer than I have been a content producer.
I'm starting to feel resentment toward the trip I'm taking to Japan in November. I've been setting aside money for this trip, and now that I have this definite goal of relocating, I would rather divert those savings to that goal. The trip now feels like something that I need to get out of the way instead of something to which I can look forward.
But that's just impatience. I have no intention of moving till I have a job lined up, and I don't anticipate the job market improving till the latter half of 2010, if then. I also don't have enough savings to pay for first and last month rent and a deposit. This relocation is a long-term goal, even though I would very much like to avoid the next Texas summer. Objectively speaking, I could get better results by waiting till after the trip, by which time perhaps the predicted economic recovery may be on its way.
I have this paranoid notion that things change in the time that I'm pursing these goals, and the only instance where such a long wait backfired was with learning web development — by the time I got good, the bottom fell out of the tech industry.
So I really need to calm down. I can still do some things to get me toward my goal, but I have to stop myself from shooting myself in the foot.
Still, I don't like waiting. Never have.