Part of managing my education on my own was setting goals and deadlines that serve as both a thing to strive for and also serving as a push against perfectionism and a pull away from complacency. The right goals makes and breaks your learning process, and it is important to know how to manage them in ways that helps build progress in the long run. Things like:

• Having clear, actionable goals
• A relevant time scale
• Optimized for tight feedback loops

There are a bunch of other things as well, but those were the things that was really grating on whenever I tried to look back on why life feels very floaty right now. I don’t like the goals and deadlines that is used by university.

I don’t particularly mind the individual ones, I think those are adequate for the context in which the exist in. No I’m talking about the grand scale of university, and what I assume is a similar problem with formal schooling in general. They’re both too long and static (heh) and what you do doesn’t really matter because the goal is to pass the goalpost at the time that you have been told to do.

Six months, or more realistically, four months, is a very big slice of time. Within that time you’re supposed to follow the assigned curriculum to a tee, and then pass the line when the time comes. There is no way to speed or slow it down according to your needs, and there is basically no room for retries unless you want to ruin the entire system. You can succeed by learning the material or cramming it at the end and it doesn’t care as long as you pass the bar. And sure people say that “oh if you really want to get good then you can just actually learn” but that sounds like coping for a broken system which is I guess what most people are doing. But as I’ve been enjoying my Economic Modelling class and getting myself back in tune with myself, I’ve been noticing again that there are ways to structure your life in ways that fits your rhythms, and the system in school have just not been doing that for me.

It’s been super nice to not have to think and relinquish my agency toward the schooling system, but now that I’m basically done with it, I think I should just get it over with and return back to a schedule that actually make sense. I was remembering what it was like back during my internship days at Renom and honestly the rhyme and rhythm of work seems like it’s a lot more interesting and negotiable compared to university. I think. I don’t know if that’s the case for all jobs, but it sure as hell does seem like the case for the jobs that my skills hits for.

Also like, I think the biggest annoyance I have with the way the goals that have been in my life for the past few years was that these goals were supposed to help me. These goals and timeframe and structure are supposed to serve as the backdrop for you to learn and utilize whatever you can to then later on manifest it into something greater. At least in work there’s no bullshit like that. You do the work. You get paid. Simple. In school you’re supposed to do all these work for what they say are knowledge, but everyone know it is actually pedigree and signalling rights. Which is like, important I guess.

But I think I’m done now. I wanna actually learn again. I don’t want goals that doesn’t care about the quality of work anymore. I want to learn with actual feedback mechanisms. I want a tight series of deadlines where I can adapt it to the speed and needs that I have at that very moment.