On Overachievement

I really don't know when it happened to me. Looking back at the journey that my relatively short life has been thus far, there doesn't seem to be a single point at which I started, but today I am an overachiever.

This realization dawned on me last night when I turned to my father at dinner and said, "You know, writing simple applications in Visual C# isn't really that hard."  

As I contemplate this quote, I realize that I may be calling "overachievement" what should instead be termed "blind/naive optimism".

The point that I am meandering toward is that the person that I am today is parsecs from the person that I was five years ago.  Sure, I had aspirations of mastering Mill's Mess and becoming a professional musician, but these were things that I only half worked at, and with easily-discernible and/or imaginable success.  Today, the things that are simple are configuring DNS or making sure that the performance of my VMWare environments are up-to-snuff, and the things that are hard are keeping in touch with my closest friends and doing my best to not exceed my current level of over-commitment.  New on my list of long-term tasks to accomplish are "Be more like your old, fun-loving self," and "Have genuine interest in others, no matter how stupid you think their ideas are."

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, "“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.”    I can't help but wonder what I gave up to switch to Dvorak.