I’m working on my statement of intent for grad school, and this is what I came up with when I was just getting ideas down. I’ll distill this into something a little less, uh, vulgar. Or something. Or not. I wonder how it’d go over.

WHY I WANT TO GO TO SCHOOL FOR LIKE TEN MORE YEARS: I never wanted to be a worker bee. I never wanted to feel trapped at a corporation; to work 9 to 5; to have water cooler conversations about sports and reality shows; to deal with management bullshit and drama; to interact with irate customers who have no concept of what is and isn’t possible within a three-month timeframe; to always be told what to work on with little to no creative freedom. I love to learn, explore, experiment. I love knowing things. Money does not motivate me, only knowledge and interesting shit. College was pretty much the best four years of my life because I was able to learn about the things I was genuinely interested in. I enjoy teaching and helping others learn new things. I enjoy the challenge of solving problems, including those that no one has ever solved before. The real world sucks. I will take the ivory tower, thankyouverymuch.

WHAT AM I INTERESTED IN: languages, both spoken and for programming.  Grammar and syntax come naturally to me. I have a linguistic bent and love learning – and learning about – spoken languages. I know three foreign languages. I can ace virtually any grammar test.  I know several programming languages and usually have little trouble picking up new ones. I’ve written my own. I plan on writing another. I find the representation of ideas in symbolic form fascinating. I love terse mathematical notation. I love logic and logical proofs.  I like theoretical aspects of languages, from the higher-level concepts of what can be represented linguistically, down to more practical details such as type systems and soundness. I want to be able to look at “academic” languages as if they were child’s play. Most importantly, I have a beard. Draw your own conclusions.

WHY I’VE CHOSEN PITT: Small and familiar. Small is good because it means less bureaucracy, more camaraderie, and more independence. Pitt isn’t particularly well-known for its CS program, especially since it lives in the shadow of CMU, but guess what: I don’t fucking care. I’m not doing this for prestige. I’m not doing this to get a better job. I’m doing this because it’s the only goddamn thing I want to do with my life. I want to be judged on my abilities, not on whom I know or whom I paid for my degree.

WHAT I WANT TO DO WHEN I FINALLY DECIDE I’M DONE: I have been very seriously considering a career in teaching all this stuff to other people. More specifically, I want to become a professor.  I want to teach, write, assist, research. I want to continue to learn for the rest of my life. I want to make languages. No, I want to make the language, the one that changes everything. I want to prove some important theorem. I want to give back to the scientific community which has given me so much.

I hold myself to insanely high standards. I’m starting to think that this is the root of many of what I feel to be my major character flaws.

I don’t know where it came from. My parents certainly weren’t strict about my performance in school or anything. As long as I did my best, that was all that mattered. They were certainly encouraging and supporting, and were proud of my accomplishments, but there were no negative consequences for failure. Maybe that’s where it came from. Maybe I thought, “well if no one else is going to hold me responsible for my success, I guess I’ll have to be the one to do it.” I don’t know. Whatever the source, it’s here, and it’s negatively affecting my life.

“But wait,” you say, “how can holding oneself to high standards be a bad thing?  Isn’t that better than having low standards?” Of course. If you don’t hold yourself to any standards, that’s bad because everything is “good enough.” You never strive to be better. You never work hard. You push others away by repeatedly failing to live up to their demands, even reasonable ones. You can even get in serious trouble with the law. But as a moderate, I would say that extremes of any kind are almost always a bad idea, and holding oneself to extremely high standards can be just as destructive. It’s a weird kind of destructive, though, because nothing actually gets destroyed. Instead, nothing that could be destroyed even gets a chance to exist.

Let me try to explain what I mean by that. I have a hell of a time coming up with ideas, in general. Programming projects, games, music, drawing, term papers, vacation plans, what to eat for dinner – these are all things that I have trouble with. I don’t have trouble doing any of them once I get started. I just have trouble actually coming up with an idea for them. And I think I know why. I am paralyzed by a fear of failure.

I’m not trying to be a dick by saying this, but you’re probably surprised to hear that. I say that because, well.. when have I failed? I’ve always done extremely well in school. I’ve made a programming language. I’ve made games, helped program an operating system, learned to draw, spoken at a conference, graduated Summa Cum Laude.. and maybe it’s all this success that has made me so afraid to fail. See, I’ve set such a precedent for myself that I feel like if I try anything and it doesn’t work out, then I’ve failed. I’ve failed to live up to my own past. It’s like an author writing a bestseller and then never being able to match that success again.

So instead, I play it safe. I don’t try to program something because it’s unfamiliar. I don’t try to draw something because it’s beyond my skill level. I buy, and eat, the same food over and over again because I’m afraid I might try something new and not like it. I avoid getting a girlfriend because I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to satisfy her on a personal level. I delay anything that has a timeline until the last minute because I’m afraid I’ll commit to an idea too early, only to realize later that it wasn’t my very best.

And here’s the contradiction: I never try any of these things because I’m afraid I’ll fail to live up to my own expectations, but as a result I feel like I’ve failed myself for not accomplishing as much as I’d like! It’s a goddamn catch-22! And it’s getting worse as I get older, as the accomplishments stack up! If I hit doctoral status, where can I go from there?!

Hhh.

“There is no goal in life; the journey is all that matters.” I don’t know who said this, but I read it a year or two ago, and it keeps popping up in my head when I think about this philosophical crap. I’ve come up with a little corollary that follows from it: “if there is no goal, there are no wrong turns.” And it’s a piece of advice that I want to start following.

So from now on, when I’m about to do something and I get that tense feeling in my throat and I alt+tab to firefox and compulsively check my email and RSS feeds for like three hours, before I pull any of that avoidance shit I’m going to say “you know what, try it.” What’s the worst that could happen? There’s no reason to be afraid. The only wrong turn is to not take the turn at all.