When I was reflecting upon my reputation I began by listing a bunch of positive traits about myself. However, the more I thought about it peoples external repuation can be marked by good or bad categories. Therefor I wanted to touch upon part of my reputation that can be eitther good or bad.
I am an incredibly Type A person. I like to be proactive, I like everything perfect, and I constantly challenge myself. On the otherhand, I handle change poorly, I'm not a "go with the flow" kind of person, and not excelling is the most disappointing thing I can think of. Whether this reputation is good or bad is in the eyes of who is judging and what their personality is.
This reputation has served me incredibly well in getting leadership positions or in the work place. I would like to attribute success in my internships or extra curriculars do to me constantly challenging myself to do better and work harder and harder to make sure I am producing the highest quality outputs. For example, I was cross country captain in high school because people knew I would go above and beyond to plan team bonding events or orchastrate extra practices. Being Type A has leveraged me with a type of intrinsic motivation that most other people do not have.
Being Type A also has its disadvantages. I'm never the person that people want to plan social events because if anything goes not as planned I stress out about it. A time that comes to mind was when we planned my roomate a birthday party, when people came 15 minutes late I thought I was going to have a melt down. This lack of flexibility can make me a difficult individual to work with sometimes.
Being Type A has served me well in most regards, but it sometimes faults me. There are a lot of times where I wish I could step back and relax. I always take on too much and have tons of things to do. I am currently sitting around watching the Michigan // Penn State game which feels like wasted productivity as opposed to a relaxing Saturday afternoon. Its a reputation that wears on you because people expect you to get things done and to excel and when you don't they are disappointed and you begin to loose face. I never want people to think I am not composed or don't have it together so I constantly work hard to make sure that I excel at what I am doing.
With me you have a reputation for making lists within pieces of writing. You've done that multiple times. I wonder if I've ever given you feedback on that. My Myers-Briggs type doesn't like lists. It likes narrative. So my question for you with that is whether by producing your list you feel you can now move on to something else. One of the big deal issues when you have a long to do list, which you apparently have, (I think I knew that already) is that you may have to confront some tradeoff on the particular task with getting a lot of tasks done. Lingering on any one task is then costly in terms of getting other things done. There is no right answer on this, but you do need some overall approach to manage the issue. For me, I've found that I continue to reflect on ideas until I write about them, which does allow me to move onto something else. I rarely if ever get the comment that I failed to think about the issue deeply enough. So I probably still linger too much on the thing before I write about it. I leave it to you how you are managing that particular tradeoff.
ReplyDeleteAs it is now Sunday and I have no clue whether you are fully booked or with some time for leisure, here is a reading suggestion for you. It is a rather depressing piece, but might give you some vantage from which to look at your comment about not being able to handle change. It is by Hanna Rosin in the most recent edition of The Atlantic and is called The Silicon Valley Suicides.
There is a lot being written about your generation, particularly about the high achievers, how over stressed they are and lacking the ability to direct their own lives in a way they find satisfying, but instead pleasing helicopter parents who overtly have the kid's interest at heart, but are actually making the kid miserable.
In last year's class I mentioned to everyone a book called Excellent Sheep, which described the issue at Yale, and where the author particularly took Econ majors to task. I wrote a post about this on my blog, which might give you a different angle into the issue. I don't think this behavior is inevitable, though it may seem that way to students of your age.
It occurred to me that I might have been too harsh above. Further, I am not a psychologist so shouldn't diagnose the causes of what you report. Nevertheless, you might find the readings I mentioned interesting, even if they don't fit your situation.
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