Leisa Michelle

Nerdy Monologues of an Autodidact

But Can’t I Have Both?

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In a story I wrote, Be What You Are, a girl dreams of being a dancer. But she doesn’t just want to be a dancer, she wants to be one of the most prestigious dancers in society – one that performs for the king and his family and guests. A sort of fairy godmother or guiding spirit, Mother Heron, appears to the girl and tells her that she has to choose: she can either find her own path and be a “true” dancer or be a dancer for the king. She can’t both be herself and be a court dancer.

Everyone has to decide what’s right for them and their own life. But I’ve learned that what you think you want and what you actually want are two very different things.

To use the girl from the story as an example, she loves dancing and is fulfilled by it. At her very core, she is a dancer. It’s what she’s meant to be. And so when she looks at the world, she assumes that this highest dancing position (what’s better or more important than dancing for the king?) is the one that she’s meant to take.

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18 Months In, 18 Months Out: An analysis of what I did before and after I dropped out of college

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I became a student at the University of Florida in August of 2013. After 18 months, I dropped out. And it’s now been 18 months since I dropped out. Because of the beautiful symmetry in time, I thought I’d analyze all the things I did while I was studying vs what I did after I quit.

So here’s all the stuff I’ve done in the past 3 years that has contributed to my personal and professional success:

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Speak What You Think

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About a week ago, this quote popped up on my Twitter feed. I absolutely fell in love with it.

“Let’s start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?” –Paul Graham

It’s a little bit embarrassing how excited I got. But the thing that I liked most about this quote was that it reminded me how important it is to form your own opinions and speak what you think – even if you feel like you have an unpopular or “the wrong” ideas and opinions.

Having unpopular opinions is relatively much safer today than it was one or two or three hundred years ago. A couple hundred years ago, if you said something bad about your king or the Church, you were imprisoned or exiled at best. Today in the US, it’s pretty safe to say that you won’t be assassinated like Cicero, or exiled like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or even thrown in jail like Oscar Wilde or Bertrand Russell.

It’s not that things are perfect today. You might lose your job or be barred from certain professions for publicly holding certain beliefs (if you’re an avid creationist, most people won’t to hire you as a biology professor). Jail time is still a possibility (though usually only if you act unlawfully according to your beliefs). But I think I’d rather lose my job than face exile or an assassin in the night.

Where would we be today without all those intellectual radicals?

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A “Hypothetical” Plan For Learning Latin

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This post is a part of my Personal Development Project for May 2016.

I got hit by a new wave of language lust the other day. Every other week or so I get an itching to study some new language, usually unprompted and without a sensible reason. This week’s sultry provocateur: Latin.

I try to trust myself and give in to these weird cravings as often as I can. And so within moments of being overwhelmed with a sudden desire to learn Latin, I was browsing Amazon to see what resources they had available.

I saw lots of textbooks, workbooks, grammar references, and parallel readers. Same old, same old. But there were so many things to choose from, and each book seemed to have its own pros and cons. And so it made me wonder (hypothetically, of course!). What exactly do I want in a Latin textbook? Or rather…

What does “learning Latin” mean to me, and how do I do it?

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Productive vs Valuable

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This post is a part of my Personal Development Project for May 2016.

“I was so unproductive yesterday.”

“I couldn’t get anything done all week. What a waste!”

“Man, I didn’t do anything today!”

The number of times I’ve said or heard these things is too high to count. We (people in general) like getting things done. We like seeing the results of our labor, creating tangible things. We’re obsessed with being productive.

Clearing your inbox is productive. Finishing that assignment is productive. Cleaning the house, taking the car into the shop, uploading the pictures from that vacation you took two months ago, doing the write-up for that meeting, being able to check something off your to-do list — all productive activities. Productivity means producing something tangible, something concrete, something completed.

Unproductive tasks, then, don’t produce tangible results. Taking a walk, for example, is unproductive. Going to the beach is unproductive. Watching a movie, getting on the internet, hanging out with friends, reading a few pages of a book, taking a nap, brewing a good cup of coffee, sitting in silence and just thinking about life — all of these things are unproductive. You usually have nothing tangible to show after you’ve engaged in these kinds of activities.

Somehow, the word “productive” has come to be “valuable”. And by extension, “unproductive” has come to mean “not valuable”. But this is a huge shame (or rather, a huge sham!) because a lot of unproductive tasks are actually quite valuable. Taking time for yourself is valuable. Building meaningful relationships is valuable. Slowing down and enjoying and appreciating life is valuable.

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