One year ago today, I wrote a blog post about conformity. I've never considered myself a comformer, but I've always compared my performance to the performance of others. This worked great for me in high school, because I was able to compare myself to other high achieving students, so I had to perform really well to be able to feel satisfied with what I did. But in college, I noticed that I was comparing myself to the average, which hurt me a lot because I would only do enough to be average (and sometimes less). There were things I learned to do that were not very productive and these allowed me to spend less time on productive things. This comparison made it harder for me to strive for something more. The lower my grades went, the worse I felt about myself, and the worse I felt about myself, the less I worked on my schoolwork. It ended up being a downward spiral, which I've talked about before on this blog.
I have never been any good at speaking to a camera. I've not been particularly good at talking in general, but I'm able to talk well enough to be able to get my point across. When I view myself on camera, I cringe because of how horribly speak and how my speaking voice is on camera. I enjoy doing multimedia, but its not something I'm interested in centering my career around. Therefore, I feel like I need to do it, but I don't feel like anything I record is very good. If its something I'm truely interested in, then I would be able to make a half decent video, but there is very little I am that interested in. I want to keep doing things that I find cool like live streaming, video editing and other things like that. I think I just really like making things look professional. I finding immensely satisfying to be able to have the power to do almost what ever I want (within the subject of course) and if I can't, I enjoy figuring out how will be able to do it. I enjoy collaboration between people and brainstorming with other people a lot. There are a couple of my favorite activities that have both of these features. One I have chosen as my job and the other I have chosen as my hobby. That is why I have chosen engineering as my career. (I think computers are more professional and allow others to be more professional as well (I said allow, not make!), and that is why I have chosen to become an electrical engineer.) That is also why I have chosen to try to create different media as my hobby. This is also why I have chosen to keep returning every once in a while to help the livestreaming crew at my high school. I enjoy being able to create cooler and cooler content that allow people see all the basketball games in a more relaxing way while making it look very professional.
Last year, at this time, I was on Christmas Break from school, much like I am this year. Last year, because of COVID, I had an extra long Christmas Break and I was able to help out a ton with a lot of the Basketball Games, but this year, I will not be able to. It comes down to the fact that the break is shorter this year and that's how the schedule panned out. I was hoping to be able to help out more, but I'm glad that there aren't many scheduled for this Christmas break because this way, I can spend more time with my family. All in all, however, I still get to work a few games (maybe) and I get to spend Christmas with my family. On top of that, I'm starting to get better at school and a lot of bad habits that I had last year were broke thanks to the help of many in my life, including those who aren't in my life anymore. I'm hoping to break even more of them this next semester as well. I'm also hoping to be able to write in this blog more next semester.
I am very blessed to have what I have and I'm happy I'm spending it the way that I am.
Merry Christmas,
Seth Pohle