Sadists at heart teachers pile on exams and research papers right before Thanksgiving. The pre-break pressure only intensifies when students set high standards. If students would just risk mediocrity they’d see it makes everything better.
We can turn to the self-proclaimed patron saint of mediocrity for what not to do on this matter. In the movie “Amadeus the composer Salieri cannot bear to work alongside the genius Mozart. The effortless perfection of Mozart’s music tortures Salieri. Indeed, the whole framing device for the movie is his confession to a priest in a mental hospital. Clearly, Salieri got something wrong. But first let’s see what he did right.
He gave up. You should give up, too. There are many reasons why whatever you do will not be enough. Here are some of them.
All the best things have already been done. Think of how many people have lived before you and of how many geniuses have already roamed the earth. Remember Mozart? He completed his first compositions at the age of 5. Before him was Leonardo da Vinci, a man so talented at everything we’re still trying to figure him out. Really, you’ve got to be incredibly talented to be invoked in the title of a bestselling novel 500 years after your death. But I’ve only been referring to individuals’ achievements.
The fact is, many things are simply impossible through individual effort. Every one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World could not have been without long-term collaborative effort. Stop doing your math homework for a second and think about the geometric perfection of the pyramids. You can just hit the pi button on your calculator, but some 3,000 years ago, delta-dwellers approximated the value in monumental stone. You can resume your homework.
But you’d better be quick about it, because you frankly don’t have enough time to do it as well as you’d like. Unrealistic deadlines are the death of invention, and they hamstring your efforts at every turn.
Furthermore, whatever you do affects very few people. All the previous examples changed people the world over for centuries to come. Will your work be remembered in a few centuries, celebrated in whatever entertainment media people are using then? More relevantly, who reads your papers but you and your teacher? Sometimes, not even you read them. That’s called working in a vacuum. It’s as if all your expert logging efforts fell a tree in the forest, and there’s nobody there to hear it.
Ultimately, you may have an idea in mind that you don’t have the skills to communicate. This is a most maddening prospect. It’s like Plato’s Theory of Forms. You can possess the perfect idea, but you sure as heck aren’t going to be able to translate it into reality. No matter how good you get, you’ll always lack something in your finished product. And if you think you don’t, then you’ve probably just lost your vision.
Now that you have no reason to expect your efforts will produce anything of value, now that you have no illusions of grandeur or hopes of success, get to work. Focus on the task at hand and nothing else, for only in the present can you produce anything at all.
Present-mindedness is not easy to achieve, but it’s certainly a practice. You can’t simply muscle your way through an assignment, but you can’t wander aimlessly through it either. The solution is to take some deep breaths and take the plunge. Block out any extraneous thoughts that would tempt you away from your work. Also, you must forget the clock entirely. Time’s relative anyway, right? You cannot work if you’re constantly thinking about how far behind you are.
So all that discouragement was only meant to break you before you enter a mindset of labor without expectations. You could very well do poorly on assignments adopting this method. Even worse, you may attain mediocrity. But if you’re really intent on just doing what’s immediately in front of your face, you’ll be a whole lot less stressed. That’s despite the truckload of work that’s been dumped on your doorstep.
Now open your front door and get going— one step at a time.