Vacation Ramblings - part 3

Full Retard

While on my swim team in high school, our coach liked to describe how hard we were supposed to push ourselves during a specific set. Warm ups were something like 15%, drills were 30-40%, some would even push us up to the 60-70% range, and then there were sprints, and those were at 100%.

I never gave a true 100% during practice

A true 100% while sprinting in swimming would mean that every single muscle in my body was dead, that I would need to stop and do nothing for a minute. I had done 100%’s before during competitions, and those 100%’s were entirely different from what I was giving at practice, because in practice, I knew that I still had a half hour worth of drills and practicing that I was going to have to go through, and I wasn’t about to give 100% when I knew I still needed a few percentages afterwards.

The honest truth, after thinking a bit about it tonight, is that I don’t think that I’ve done an honest 100% on anything lately. An honest, full fledged, 100%, nothing holding back, trying with everything, throw caution to the wind, full retard of a try. Everything that I could think of, I willingly cut myself some slack and didn’t push as hard as I could have, and I don’t know why.

My work, I could work a full shift, I could push to move over to a different area that’s been needing me since I joined the Visa team, but I don’t. I stay where I’m at, and even where I’m at I rarely do an honest 100% day, I always phone it in and slack off at work.

Writing? I haven’t done a 100% on that for a long time. I know that I can do better at that.

Being a husband? I phone it in so often on that one. I know I should be better, but I just don’t do it because I’m lazy.

Church stuff? I have done close to 100%, I know that I can, and I know that I should, but for some reason I just don’t.

Nothing within my life is something that I’ve committed to, it’s really sort of weird now that I’m thinking of it. You’d think somewhere in there I could say that I tried with everything, that I gave it my all, that I couldn’t have done anything else, but I don’t have that. There’s not one thing that I can think of that I didn’t cut myself short on, that I didn’t take unnecessary breaks from just because I wasn’t ‘feeling it’ or some other lame excuse.

It’s important to understand that just because I’m not giving 100% does not mean that I’m not trying. I’m still giving some good percentages for some of those categories, but it’s still not that all-important 100%.

I don’t know if it’s I’m afraid of what the results would be (in a good way) if I did go full retard on something, or if it’s me being afraid of what the results would be (in a bad way) if I did go full retard. For example, writing – if things go exceptionally well because I put in everything that I can, there’s a whole new level of pressure and stress that gets put into my life. However, if I dump everything into it and nothing happens, then that means that no matter how hard I try, I don’t have what it takes, which is depressing in it’s own right. By not trying all of the way, I avoid the best case scenario because I’m flawed and I don’t try as hard, but at the same point I miss the worse case scenario because I can always sit back and say that I didn’t give it my all, that there was something missing in the big picture and that if I just try a bit more next time that that will be the time that it works.

Even things that I know that I shouldn’t be afraid of the 100%, like the church, fall into this pattern. I don’t do 100% and I get to be average, hide in the background and not pull much attention to myself. I do the 100% and suddenly things start happening, promises start being fulfilled, and people start looking, and I don’t want that. I don’t like addition problems.

I know that I should step it up, that I should be giving it everything that I have in the areas that are important to me, and trying to do everything that I can to achieve my worthy goals, but at the same time, I really don’t want to because if I do the consequences are going to possibly be ones that I don’t want.