inspiration and humility

I've been thinking a lot lately about growing up, and professions, and learning, and such. I tend to do this kind of thinking internally for the most part, because I'm a pretty cautious and private person by nature, but I wanted to see if I could set some of it down here.

I want to be the kind of person who keeps learning, and keeps doing cool things, basically indefinitely. In order to live up to that image of myself, it's necessary to cast aside another image of myself, namely, that I am a competent person who does everything right the first time. I think my revelation is that inspiration and humility have to go hand in hand. In order to realize the fruits of your inspiration, you need to allow yourself to wade through the mud a bit. You need to get down there and learn, and grow.

Having a good career protects me from having to do that kind of re-evaluation very often, and I'm starting to feel like a weaker person because of it. I think that's funny.

***

So I'm writing a java socket server for a game, or loose collection of games, that I want to write, probably in AS3. It's provisionally called BuildGrow. We'll see if anything comes out of it, but I've decided that I'm not going to grade myself on the outcome of the project, but rather I'm going to enjoy the process of learning and building. I think that by focusing on that I might be able to recapture some of the fun and excitement that I used to feel about the work I do.

By the way happy new year, and cheers, and everything is going pretty great for me/us. I don't want to let the somewhat melancholy nature of this post to lead you astray; these are excellent problems to have, and I am happy to be at a point in my life where I can worry about tertiary stuff like this. ;-)