What is discovery?
January 05, 2018
Discovery has had a special place in my heart for most of my life now. I don’t really have a lot of memories from my childhood, but I do remember that I always loved to explore and ask questions.
It’s how I learned about emotions – what they mean and how they interact with each other, unraveling the world around me. Unfortunately, procrastination has been with me just as long. I like to think that there is a delicate dance between the two forces and it’s what makes life so sweet when you find that pocket of understanding. Ultimately, that’s what I would like this section to be about. Balance.
What I Mean by ‘Discovery’
Don’t worry, I promise I won’t fill up this entire blog with pretentious stories of my childhood. Instead, my plan is to put everything that isn’t explicitly related to teaching a concept of design or development. That doesn’t mean you won’t see code inside of this section, it just means that it should be read with the understanding of a deeper concept in the background. Think of it as a journey down a path that helped me come to an understanding about a subject that I would like to share with you. To demonstrate, I’d really like to talk about that little rascal, procrastination, again.
I’m kind of ashamed to admit that it took me two entire months after finishing this website to fight procrastination enough to write this article. After a success it can sometimes be hard to keep working on the finer details, especially when it is the end of the semester and you finally have time to yourself. So after a few weeks of getting used to working full-time again, and beating some videogames, it was time to get back on the writing wagon again. Something I had realized during my free time, however, was that I could actually use procrastination to my benefit.
Procrastination: Friend or Foe?
Like most people my age (22 as of writing this article), procrastination is seen as a sign of weakness among superiors and peers alike. This is the thing I find most repulsive about the idea of procrastination. How can we unite against a common foe if the only option is to either ignore it or be shamed? What if there was another way?
This idea got me thinking: What if every time I feel myself procrastinating I instead immediately do the task my brain wants me to avoid? Here’s the best part; it worked! That’s when I discovered that it wasn’t just some knee-jerk response to doing something I don’t want to do, but rather a warning sign that I should go do it. You have to take what you want to do out of the equation for a moment and work with procrastination instead of against it.
Not only does this help with the anxiety of something looming over your head until the day it comes crashing down around you, but also a deeper sense of having control of what you do and making a decision that positively impacts your life. I suppose the point I am trying to make is that procrastination is a necessary evil, so we might as well not take our brain’s natural warning system for granted. Use it as a flagging system to know that you need to get something done, rather than an excuse to run away.
Why We Discover
In my case, using the procrastination issue above as an example, I discovered so that I could change something in my life that was impacting me negatively on an almost daily basis. This is core to most of my discoveries. They should be something about yourself that you want to explore and get to the root of. Something that can help you feel fulfilled, whatever it is that does that for you.
Discovering who you are isn’t one large quest, but rather a lot of little ones that build to a path that can uncover pieces about you that you didn’t even realize were there! Usually these are done without much thought, and can be just as effective. Though, I do find it helpful to be on the lookout just in case I might stumble across something I never noticed before.