coldhearted scientist وداد

So the reason I am obsessed with Robert Boice is, what he has to say applies to me in part and in part, not. I think he assumes one is either interested in one’s work, and so is at least not trying to force that, or is not interested, and so must force it. And once I became a procrastinator and a blocker, all the things he says will happen, happened to me. Yet while I paid and continue to pay a very high price for it, and while I believe it was all avoidable and could have been handled in a far more productive way, I disagree that every aspect of my procrastination and blocking crisis was negative.

1. It is not that I do not know how to work. It is that I believe that if I am seen to be original, or to have anything new to offer, or to do anything in an innovative way, I will be executed. It is because this fear applies, in my case, only to the field I am in, that I have always thought I should change fields.

2. Regarding changing fields, I am not a procrastinator about that either. The problem has always been and is still in part financial. More importantly, it is about being executed. If I change fields, some people will be scared or have their feelings hurt, so I will be executed.

So this is why I complain about Boice. When I was obedient, and the results of my work were unlikely to challenge anyone too much, I worked like a true professional. I started that in the sixth grade and continued through a whole assistant professorship and a half. That is why I feel the Boicean advice to be condescending. Doesn’t he realize we knew these things already, and that they are how we got into college, through college, into graduate school, through graduate school, into tenure track jobs, and through the tenure process? Can he not find something to say that goes beyond normal work strategies? Of course, this is not entirely fair since many seem not to have learned the work strategies I did, and since even I keep returning to Boice and conceding him some, if not all points.

3. I feel somewhat guilty not to be just a get-it-done man like Boice, since I do know how relaxed and calm that can make one feel and how competent, and how much one can accomplish if one does as he says. Yet having been who he would have liked me to be from age 10 to age 35, led me to avoid questioning what I was doing at all. Questions could be reserved for after the project was over, after the degree was finished, after I was sure I had employment for the next year, after tenure. There was always a new project by that time and what I truly procrastinated upon was not the work at hand but on integrating the work to myself. And there was a time in which these two things, the work and I, went hand in hand. But when they bifurcated I knew I should concentrate as always on the work at hand but I wanted to do my work, and I did not know for a long time how to make the twain meet.

Axé.