Discipline

It looks like the discipline is starting to pay off.  Although it doesn’t seem like it now, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and that light is not a train.  I’m on day two of waking up at 5:45, and making progress through the ICND 2 book.  I need to get me a new set of headphones and microphones so I can go back to my recording.  But that’s not going to happen right now.  I’m not broke, but I’m not going to push the envelope with useless purchases.  Anything I get right now either has a need right now or it doesn’t get purchased. 

On the plus side, I won’t have Internet at the house until the first.  How can that be a plus side?  Simple… very few distractions.  If you have no distractions, you get done what you need to do unless your brain is just jumping through crazy that day.  I’ve had those days.  But with a lack of TV and Internet, it hasn’t been as bad.  I guess I feel less stressed when I don’t have either.  Kind of cool, actually. 

I’ve always wanted to learn a new language, so I’ve started on that as well.  I think maybe my brain wants to do eighteen different things, and if I ignore it for too long, it becomes obsessive about whatever it is I’m trying to ignore.  So what I’m going to do is simply give it what it wants the first 20 minutes of my day.  I’m probably looking at 20 minutes a day, 5 days a week, for 20 weeks.  We’ll see how far I’ve made it then.  Could be amazing.  Could be nothing.  I have also found that something with interaction first thing in the morning works a lot better than reading dense material about PVST+ or other mind-bogglingly wonderful concepts.  Sure, Spanning Tree Protocol is awesome in practice, but reading about it is about as interesting as pulling teeth. 

I still keep looking into methods to learn faster and retain information better.  I haven’t made any progress, as I’ve not really bought any books as of late.  But I’m starting to look.  I think it was Jim Quick who said “There’s no such thing as a good learner and a bad learner.  There is only a trained and untrained mind.”  And that resonated with me fairly deeply, as I’ve spent a lot of time studying to not remember a single bit of what I studied. 

So what I know is that what I’m doing isn’t working, yet I’m continuing to do the same thing, over and over again.  

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting to get a different result. 

It’s about time to jump off the insanity treadmill.