Strangely enough, I have always found life to be rather simple.  I am a simple person with simple needs who has been able to learn and live and grow with little to no effort.  Now I am in a great struggle with myself personally to grow and learn in a new profession that is drastically different from my old one and I find that the stuff that I used to absorb easily is now a chore.  This will be a log of my struggle and how I overcome it.

I realized in High School that I could absorb information and make very good grades with little effort.  That may have been a function of a rather poor public school education or it could be that I was a genius – I’m guessing the former option is more likely.  I was able to take advanced placement courses in High School and I never shied away from a challenging course and I did pretty well.  I graduated with honors and was then thrown into college.

My college years seemed quite uneventful at the time.  I worked full time and went to school part so it took me all of 7 years to get my bachelor’s degree.  My first couple of semesters at college seemed to challenge me but were nothing I couln’t handle.  Then I entered college calculus.  Derivatives and derivatives of derivatives became a bit more challenging than I was comfortable with.  Pay attention to the word “comfortable” because it is a recurring theme in my struggle.  Calculus kicked my butt and I managed to eke out a passable ‘C’ in the course.  The only other course I struggled with was French which my professor agreed that I spoke very well, I just couldn’t write it accurately and therefore couldn’t pass the test.  Draw your own conclusions about the requirements of precisely written language in a class that merely was required for my degree and not my profession.

So anyhow, I finally graduated from college and already had a full time job.  I had been working full time for years at that point.  I had been rising through the ranks of the IT industry and was putting the pressure on my bosses to make some real money.  I had been in mainframe operations, operations supervisor, and mainframe programming.  Then I began migrating to PCs and developing applications to process our work on a more distributed system…(boring stuff edited out). 

More later…