“The secret to high performance and satisfaction—at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.”

Incentives, monetary and otherwise, are not the answer, but how do you change internal drive?

My solution: Why not counteract the dawdling days by moving even slower!

If you are trying to contact me in the early evenings only to find that I’ve fallen asleep, I apologize in advance. I’ve descended into one of the most unproductive phases of my adult life. Someone please inspire me.

Also, I think I’m doomed to write only about time until my watch is fixed.

And, an accompanying article from the Chronicle of Higher Education on for-profit education.

We all have those moments—where time passes by so slow it’s as if she’s been sedated by our own ennui. This essay I just read on boredom suggested that there was a neurological explanation, as there always is (love’s just a chemical reaction, yeah?).

Researchers have discovered that when people are conscious but doing nothing — for example, lying in an f.M.R.I. scanner, waiting to be given some simple mental task as part of a psychology experiment — the brain is in fact firing away, with greater activity in regions responsible for recalling autobiographical memory, imagining the thoughts and feelings of others, and conjuring hypothetical events: the literary areas of the brain, you might say. When this so-called default mode network is activated, the brain uses only about 5 percent less energy than it does when engaged in basic tasks. But that discrepancy may explain why time seems to pass more slowly at such moments. It may also explain the agitated restlessness that compels the bored to seek relief in doodling or daydreaming.

So, bore me & spend a little (more) time with me.
“Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.”

Time: a measurement system invented by humans to quantify a universal and constant progression whose true definition escapes us. And the caveat—our minds can manipulate and perceive time as it wishes.

Is time subjective? Time keeps moving without us. Don’t be stuck in the wrong time.

[Source]

But there were other lessons Simon taught me that I regret learning. I learned not to trust people; I learned not to believe what they say but to watch what they do; I learned to suspect that anyone and everyone is capable of “living a lie”. I came to believe that other people – even when you think you know them well – are ultimately unknowable. Learning all this was a good basis for my subsequent career as an interviewer, but not, I think, for life. It made me too wary, too cautious, too ungiving. I was damaged by my education.

An excerpt written by Lynn Barber, whom the movie An Education was based on.

As with every new year, I’m prone to those awful pensive state of minds where I can’t help but rant about my discontents about this arbitrary time of new found goals, the shortcomings of society, the educational system — anything really. [Exhibits A-Z of my cynicism and negativity: On people becoming increasingly banal, on being skeptical of NY resolutions, on arbitrary ambition, on — this one is just really me being incoherent and trying to sound like a smart 16 year-old, on apathy, on being devoid of personal emotions, etc. See the archives.]

This year, hopefully as a sign of growth and progress, I will transcend beyond those diatribes.

Anyway, as the frou frou statement, “As I grow older…” goes — As I grow older (and wiser, I hope), I’ve realized that:

• 1. My blog is completely personal. I used to justify its impersonal nature by deflecting any indication of personal (How do you noun this? Personality? Ah, personal “feelings.” Whatever.) by separating myself as a person and my actions, etc. from my thoughts and ideas. Then, it dawned on me that if you haven’t got your beliefs, ideas, alongside your actions and experiences, who are you? So, this is me. Supposedly.
• 2. When I was 15, I looked 20. Now that I’m 20, I look 15 again. Cruel joke, reconstructive surgery.
• 3. I’m privy to the universe’s “coincidences.” Yeah, I’m in on the joke(s). These coincidences and circumstances that I find myself in nowadays — they’re comic relief from the dullness that is my everyday life (work, dinner parties, and classes that get in the way of the former, etc.). It’s kind of like the village idiot in Cinema Paradiso (I just watched the 3-hour director’s cut with my sister last night) who comes out to the town square every now and then, proclaiming “This is my square!” Those circumstances — kind of like that. This is my square!
• x. Okay, fine. My new year’s resolution is to not be such a wet blanket. I should also cease any behaviors that would make others suspect that I am a robot (e.g. not having feelings, not crying — as to not short circuit myself or something, sleeping in an electronic blanket, putting chips in my shoes while running, etc.).

I use the restroom often — due to excessive liquid consumption, not excessive high-fiber consumption, to be frank.

Exciting details ensue.

“For homework, please draw your name (first or last or nickname) in one of the fonts you have the sheet for. Of course, that means that you’ll either have to research the letters online to find those m’s or j’s or k’s or other letters that aren’t on your sheet — OR you have to try to extrapolate from the features in front of you. This is all about learning to look at the letters, so do not be anxious about getting it ‘right’ just try to make the best possible observations and drawings.”