Day 17: Gearing back up

Day 17 was also nothing special. No conversations lasted more than a few minutes. One funny approach happened when I started talking to this young, gorgeous black haired/black eyed (must have been a latina) lady who was in a huge rush (honestly, I swear if there’s nothing I’ve gotten out of this, it’s that there’s a huge correlation between female attractiveness and being in a rush in NYC). We walked and talked a bit

Don’t mean to sound down. I, for one reason or another, have had far too much time off, and am now clearly rusty. This really throws back into my face a pertinent issue: this whole thing really is a skill. I felt I was much better, more confident, had better approaches when I was (a) happier/more optimistic about the whole thing and (b) had more local experience (that is, within the past few days / weeks had approached a lot more). Now, I’m back to a somewhat uncomfortable period of approaching and logically knowing I’ve done way more than this, but in reality, feeling a whole lot of inner-resistance and cobwebs. I know I just need to power through this awkward period.

Well, I’m happy I’ve committed to those 30 days because this clearly takes a lot of time. Though in the back of my mind, I wonder if what’ll really make this work is insane persistence met with ridiculous failure rates/embarrassment for a fairly long period if time (perhaps far longer than 30 days)…….

It actually reminds me of another time in my life that has nothing to do with girls.

Entering high school, academically I was nothing special. Neither was my school system. For some reason still unknown to me, I wanted badly to go to a particular prestigious college. Yet, I knew that the level of accomplishment needed was far, far beyond what I was capable of doing as a freshman. In particular, I needed to get much, much better at math.

While I did earn an A in freshman geometry and was one of the “best” students in my algebra II class, I knew this was far below where I needed to be (again, my high school was terrible and despite having an A in geometry, I didn’t even really know algebra). The summer after freshman year, I started doing the problems in a study guide. Man, I was horrible. For months and months and months, I kept pouring more and more time into math practice and getting problems wrong. There really was no strong indication that I was improving. But, for some reason, I thankfully continued doing these problems.

Sophomore year rolled around and I was still lousy at math. But, I convinced my Algebra II teacher to let me teach myself from a different book instead of participating in her class. Month after month went by. I spent extended time on the weekend reading chapters, and doing tons of practice problems at the end of each section. Eventually, I started to get better. Much better. At some point, something clicked. I then flew through 3 years of high school math in 3/4 of a school year.  I took the Math SAT Achievement test that most folks take as a junior or senior and scored nearly perfectly (</brag>). This was the first time I had ever done well on a standardized test. The rest is history.

Since then, I’ve developed a belief that I can overcome and learn things in life the same way I learned math. And while I haven’t really applied this belief since the glory days of high school, I believe that with raw persistence and discipline, I can power through and learn anything. The question for me now, is what do I spend my time doing. What is that noble pursuit.

• 7 approaches
• 0 to follow up on
• still shaking the cobwebs off my sabatical