Today was a lot of trying and failing. Among other things, I really wanted to print some things on the Reprap but each time it went wrong and the whole thing was very gumption depleting.
It wasn’t hard to realize that the machine was out of adjustment, and no amount of luck or perseverance was going to change that. But I “just wanted it to work”, and I didn’t want to be bothered with calibrating it, so I just got frustrated and turned to working on something else (there’s always something else to work on after all).
A few hours later Jamie made some really cool crafts and shared them with me. Seeing them, and seeing the work that went into them, I suddenly had the motivation to make the printer work again, and I was even excited about the process of recalibrating it.
I think it’s easy to get frustrated when focus on an end goal creates an illusion that the steps between where you are and where you want to be are unimportant or nonexistent. To think that the goal even exists without the steps leading to it is absurd if you think about it, but it’s easy to loose sight of this in the heat of the moment.
Even though reigning from a pursuit can feel like failure or giving up, often this is one of these invisible steps, and in my case a necessary one to put me on the path to mustering the ambition necessary to complete the entire course.
- Jason