On Grade Seeking Missiles
Morning Thoughts #54
Are you seeking a purpose or seeking a grader? Who defines your finishing line? Are you only satisfied when the red ink of the world has taken notice of your undertaking and you've succeeded in receiving an "A," not in your handwriting, circled? If you complete your (life?) assignment but find no one to turn it into, what was it even worth it if you do not get official credit for it? Oh, we products of 21st-century American education, how we continually seek the standing of ourselves in some teacher's eyes!
Often, when we give up on a project before its completion, it's due to being unable to find a worldly grader to appraise it. Oh, the frustration we feel when our rough drafts remain uncommented upon for too long! Dilettantism (and probably Don Juanism too) can be explained, at least in part, by what I'm here calling "grade seeking," a very close cousin to status seeking. Two possible reasons that one might assume many identities in life are that one either moves on from one identity to the next once positive recognition and a "grade" is given for it or moves on out of impatience for not finding a grader for the previous identity, hoping for better luck with the next.
Personally, I love to read biographies and believe there is often much to learn from the lives of those successful and noteworthy enough that a biography has been written about them in the first place. But I realize, too, that reading such books is also a kind of cheating. It's like watching a big-budget movie made for American audiences; you just know that the story will end well or, at the very least, there will be some uplifting or inspirational element to it. Even those who are written about because of the sheer spectacle of their failure have still achieved a kind of notoriety and thus a "grade." And those who seek the status conferred by this kind of "grading" will deem such publicly documented failures a success, at least to some extent. For those thus inclined, the fact of a grade (and sometimes any grade at all equates to a good grade in this infinite universe) makes any story a feel-good story.
Alas, friends, your life is no trite American blockbuster or pre-written biography. The chances of complete failure, which are theoretical in the first pages (or first half) of a biography, are absolutely real for you as you live your life and find your way. We limit ourselves and our potential when we make absolute demands of future success before we take the needed steps to head in that possible direction. If we think anything through enough, we know that thought can never offer complete guarantees. And then our caution tempts us to refuse to move rather than risking complete failure, better, we convince ourselves, than going ahead only to throw our life away like an unread paper that no teacher ever even read through.
But, friends, here is the hard truth! You have to accept the possibility of utter failure if you are ever to achieve anything truly meaningful. You have to complete your best work just to complete it, even if it was unassigned and every classroom you've entered thus far has only offered a means of better preserving your solitude. Do not be afraid of living a life that lacks a grade. Being assigned a grade too soon is almost a worse fate because it grants one a feeling of false completion. Feeling done because we're told we're done is a recipe for never arriving. Oh, beware, lovers of life, of premature evaluation!
The grade, the status, the external validation: they are conning us into living fragmented lives. Complete your work, and its possible failure will only be that of the graders. And if you are unable to complete your work, but not because you turned away from it, you possess a fragment wholly different from those other prematurely celebrated or abandoned ones, given up on because they were graded too soon. Have the courage to live a life without guarantees and grade yourself without inflation! The honor we bestow on the truly self-made, we should also bestow on those who rigorously self-grade.