Comments on: Complacency

By: Chris Ballance

Chris Ballance — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:46:10 +0000

Coming up with 57.0750 really made me think. I haven’t solved a good puzzle in ages. You’re right, it is easy to become complacent (and reliant on a calculator for things that you should be able to do in your head). Thanks for the reminder that this that we can all do better.

By: Tyler

Tyler — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:06:24 +0000

The Rhythm of Life by Matthew Kelly addresses alot of the same stuff you’re talking about here. You should give it a read.

By: Oscar

Oscar — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 15:43:14 +0000

I love your post. I read it to remind me not to be complacent. Lately I’ve realized what I’ve always heard and been told. At the core of me I relized that the only way to fight complacency is to want something and to work through *anything* to get that. If you don’t have that dream, the goal –some call it, then you have nothing to strive for or even try so why would you. Especially like you point out, when in this culture things are relatively “easy” to get if you just want to be average.

By: Sula

Sula — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 19:48:41 +0000

I loved you posting. I am from Ecuador where I attended a German School. Although it was not as strict as you describe yours, we had to study every single day in case we were randomly chosen for a graded review. If we had bad grades, we had to repeat the whole school year! That “training” served me in my university days in the U.S. where keeping a high GPA seemed like a walk in the park. I was able to obtain scholarships thanks to my good grades. I admit I have fallen into complacency myself. Articles like yours and finding people like you remind me how awesome it is to live a life with passion, learning new things every day and striving to be better. Thanks

By: Too Smart

Too Smart — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:02:59 +0000

[...] in a field I do not like. A job I am still in today. All because I was lazy. I was, and still am, complacent. If I was smart, I would have recognized the power of what I had, and used it in a much better [...]

By: Jin

Jin — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 03:57:57 +0000

@Kim, I’m not a morning person. :) Thanks.

@Nathan, I’ll call Liam Neeson so you can get some Batman training.

By: Nathan Bowers

Nathan Bowers — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:47:15 +0000

The real answer is “hey, that’s the leaf from the Apple logo!”

Great story Jin. Enjoyed reading it. I’m also facing the “okay, I’m almost mid 30s, and things are good, but I’m not Batman yet.”

By: Kim H

Kim H — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:09:16 +0000

Wow – I didn’t receive problems like that until my first year of Calculus in college.

Learning standards, markup, and the many ins and outs of CSS is only the beginning of web design; the entire life of web design and development is constant learning – as you mentioned in a past post it’s also about the taste of the designer, but it is also learning what is up to standards as of now.

The indolence is certainly difficult though. Whenever I began college, I had just gotten out of an easy ride through high school. Granted I took the most advanced courses I could (and did well), but finding the motivation to do my college work was… difficult, to say the least, and my grades suffered for it. Same when I worked from home; some days I felt like taking a “break” because I’d stayed up late the night before doing whatever. I’ve learned to overcome this sloth though through discipline; even on my days off from here at the office, I wake up to an early alarm clock every morning and go to bed at a certain time, and every day after work I do some coursework or housework, and client work.

But as Dmitry said, you had motivation because of this goal, and that’s where drive comes from. The drive to be a better designer in order to have clients (and a job), and in the case of a college student, the drive to finish classes to have a good career or graduate school, or in my case doing client work + cooking for myself and my fiance + work + everything else (I’m a couch potato otherwise).

This is a very good post though; I really enjoyed reading this slice of life.

Also, not sure if anyone else answered it, but 57.0570 was what I got for the answer :)

By: Jin

Jin — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:28:03 +0000

@Yantra, you’re not the only one who made the Asian Michael Jackson remark… Under the current circumstance, thanks? :)

@Dmitry, I think you hit it on the nail. Sometimes I feel like learning new things and not applying them to something more concrete can take a toll on my attention span. I have a few side projects I’ve started working towards, and they’re more tangible goals than just aimlessly browsing blogs.

By: Dmitry

Dmitry — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:13:23 +0000

I think the answer on fighting complacency lies at the start of your story. You mentioned exams that you had to take, and that success in these exams was vital if you were to succeed later in life — these exams guarded the way to further opportunities. You had a goal, or maybe more than one — a yet shapeless goal about what you want to do later in life (although you knew you had to succeed at these exams as your grandmother reminded you), and an actionable goal of actually passing the exam — getting those 247+ points.

You had motivation and drive because of that goal — you knew what you wanted to achieve — what you *had* to achieve — and so you worked towards it because you could see how your actions now would directly influence the outcome of that goal. Complacency then, should be fought by working towards *something*. You have to know what you want, you have to know why you’re spending this time learning or working. What is it that you want to achieve? I think if you can’t answer that then it would be difficult to not get complacent as you will simply switch to doing things that bring short term pleasure rather than some long term benefit. E.g. shift from learning hard at school to playing computer games because that 247 point exam is no longer looming overhead.