Should I cross-post this to the project log, I wonder.

Renee and I were talking about our time in college yesterday, I think spurred by some pictures from my trip to Platteville last weekend.

As I recall:

• While my general sense that a lot of schooling is boring and pointless may have held true for some classes (most of which I've forgotten about), I had several classes that taught me things I would not have learned on my own.
  • The Electical Engineering courses demystified circuits and computer hardware somewhat
  • Circuits 2, or whichever one was about AC, was super hard and I barely passed it. and I'd kind of like to try it again with a more open mind, and having read bits of some signal processing books, for musical purposes.
  • Databases made me understand relational databases. Many of my coworkers seem to lack the inuition for normalizing (and why it's useful) that came naturally to me, having taken that class.
  • There was a bonus class I took first semester on multithreading in Java that I found enlightening.
• Tutoring was very helpful. I kinda-sorta understood some physics stuff after taking physics classes, but having to explain it to someone else forced me to chew on the ideas a bit more, and some concepts only then finally clicked. I had several "a-ha" moments while talking to Staboh.
• The psychology class I took my final semester taught me how to study. Spaced repetition and stuff. So I'd go to the library between classes and do some studying (however that was done; I kind of forget the details, now). That semester I got all As. (It also helped that I had not a lot of classes and was able to sleep until 10AM most days.)
• World History with David Rowley. He kind of "told it like it is" more than any other history class I'd taken. Also it was actually pretty interesting.

Renee said something about lacking a challenge, now that we're out of school, and that struck a chord.

Not that there are no challenges. Life is full of them. They're just a different kind of challenge. More amorphous. Less well-defined.

Often the challenge is not my ability to understand something, but my ability to stick to a project long enough to complete it. And that's hard because there's nobody holding me accountable. It's hard for me to hold myself accountable because I'm always second-guessing whether it's even worthwhile to be doing whatever it was I originally set out to do.

For example: cutting and installing French cleats all over the house. I keep coming back to this as something that would be helpful; I make good use of the French cleats that are already up, and more of them would solve the "where does this go" problem for various things that are currently without a dedicated storage spot. But I end up only actually making a few French cleat sections per year.

(It's a bit unsettling that I'm measuring the time taken to do a relatively simple carpentry project in years.)

So 'challenge' is important, but not sufficient motivation on its own. Novelty helps a lot. I can get very 'into' something if I'm learning new things. But novelty isn't very sustainable, because once I've mastered some part of the process I don't want to do it anymore.

Doing a project as part of a social activity can be motivating. Either doing work for someone, or with someone. This is why having a group where we all promise to post a new track every day (I started the 'Beats' signal group on 2025-05-13) is effective. And having a buddy with whom to regularly go to Planet Fitness.

I can encourage myself to do things with to-do lists and caffeine and stuff, but ultimately that 'brute force' approach seems to be unreliable and lead to burnout. Having someone to do the thing for/with is, I think, a more sustainable solution.

I already knew all these things. I'm just writing this to remind myself.

Maybe I should make myself give Stewie one SMP update per day or something.

This leaves me still unsure how to get on with the French cleats.