I was one of those kids that got things right. The cool teachers liked me, I knew the answers to the tests without glancing at the homework, I did pretty well in sports and with friends and all of the rest of the stuff that provides a metric for "how you're doing" before someone pays you for your work.
I wasn't challenged, though. At least, if I was my brain's run away from the experience so well that it's poured bleach over the neurons that held the memory. I used to tell myself that being naturally "good" at a lot of stuff was a gift.
I was wrong. You're supposed to learn a lot of things when you're younger, and the older i get the more I'm realizing that those lessons either never happened or were successfully summarily ignored. It was my own fault, and now I'm paying the price.
The main thing I'm attempting to burn into my psyche is Discipline. I truly believe that nothing worth doing is easy, and yet if I have 30 days to compete a project, I'll spend 26 or 27 of them in my own head, cruising around.
I'm not lazy. the project is on my mind the whole time, but the DOING is not getting DONE.
Then, the sleep stops. The nerve endings get set on fire and the words pour out in a tumble. I'll throw myself into it, and (in-between promising all of the Muses that I'll never do this again) barely make the deadline.
October was a different beast, though. I had clear goals (Edit the last few chapters of one novel and write ~75k words of another). I was literally dancing on October 1st, because I wasn't going to slack. I refused to let myself slow down. I was going to pace myself and do the "right" thing, for once.
And how's it going? Well, we're almost halfway through the month and I'm blogging... :) I editted the first novel though, which is ready for the real editor now, and I've got 55k/100k done on the second one. Soooo, okay, I guess?
It's MUCH better than I normally do, and I suppose I'll allow myself to feel pride and accomplishment and all of the other things EA says go along with getting close to a goal. We'll see how the next few weeks, go.