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[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#21: "My Big Successes Are Luck-Based."
This may seem familiar to some of you. It's a companion piece to an earlier entry in the series, and it helps twist it even worse than it had been before. Because, you see, when I start talking about how everything is my fault, it's not a balanced fault. I don't claim credit for the good things that happen that I could attribute to myself, but I will accept and blame myself for the bad things that happened in my life.
( This is, as they say, sub-optimal. )
Sometimes it really is lucky, or due to someone else's work, that something I did gets lots of kudos and comments (out of a couple hundred works, I have one that has more than 1,000 kudos. It's a fluke. But I did write it, and I still like it.) Or it's a collaborative effort that gets something done, and the credit really should be shared between all the people who helped make it happen. But then there are times where I manage to figure out that the reason a computer isn't updating itself is because it's had a bit flipped that tells the update process to fail (once I finally get a useful error message out of it, aigh.) and that once the bit gets flipped back, it works fine. That's pretty cool, and it's a success that's me. As is the subsequent success at decoding another deceptive error message and using my information professional powers to resolve that error message. And then the third necessary success in getting the machine to boot properly again after all of the previous hilarity because I hadn't followed a previous instruction exactly rightly, but I was able to figure out how to get back to a working environment and then run that command correctly. (And then the need to free up space to get something else to work...) After enough instances of success (including, for example, all of those delicious cooking successes), it becomes clear that it's not all luck that's contributing here.
So I might still be deferential about my own successes outside of my evaluation forms or when I'm trying to make a point. If I am, it's good practice and helpful at chasing away the brain weasels if you can get me to admit that my successes have at least as much to do with good preparation and/or skill as fortune or other people coming through in the clutch. After all, as you've seen so far, there are a lot of things that I don't believe fully any more, and a lot of them are things where it would be good for me not to believe them at all.
#21: "My Big Successes Are Luck-Based."
This may seem familiar to some of you. It's a companion piece to an earlier entry in the series, and it helps twist it even worse than it had been before. Because, you see, when I start talking about how everything is my fault, it's not a balanced fault. I don't claim credit for the good things that happen that I could attribute to myself, but I will accept and blame myself for the bad things that happened in my life.
( This is, as they say, sub-optimal. )
Sometimes it really is lucky, or due to someone else's work, that something I did gets lots of kudos and comments (out of a couple hundred works, I have one that has more than 1,000 kudos. It's a fluke. But I did write it, and I still like it.) Or it's a collaborative effort that gets something done, and the credit really should be shared between all the people who helped make it happen. But then there are times where I manage to figure out that the reason a computer isn't updating itself is because it's had a bit flipped that tells the update process to fail (once I finally get a useful error message out of it, aigh.) and that once the bit gets flipped back, it works fine. That's pretty cool, and it's a success that's me. As is the subsequent success at decoding another deceptive error message and using my information professional powers to resolve that error message. And then the third necessary success in getting the machine to boot properly again after all of the previous hilarity because I hadn't followed a previous instruction exactly rightly, but I was able to figure out how to get back to a working environment and then run that command correctly. (And then the need to free up space to get something else to work...) After enough instances of success (including, for example, all of those delicious cooking successes), it becomes clear that it's not all luck that's contributing here.
So I might still be deferential about my own successes outside of my evaluation forms or when I'm trying to make a point. If I am, it's good practice and helpful at chasing away the brain weasels if you can get me to admit that my successes have at least as much to do with good preparation and/or skill as fortune or other people coming through in the clutch. After all, as you've seen so far, there are a lot of things that I don't believe fully any more, and a lot of them are things where it would be good for me not to believe them at all.
