Today I woke up with the urge to be an engineer. I had the desire to design something novel and exciting. There was hope when I opened up my eyes. For the first time in a long time I knew what I needed to do. In my 3 years of working I have never woken to wanting to do my job. I have woken up to being afraid of what will happen if I don't do my job which is a different story. But today was different. For some reason, I could feel energy inside of me that wanted to propel me forward. The other day I had this concept of self improvement and today I have this concept of design. There must be a connection between the two that I will need to explore further.
I actually went to engineering school. However, engineering school ended up being something different than what I expected it to be. It taught me a lot of science and math that often felt disconnected from one another. I took regular physics classes and math classes but only a handful of classes put them together for me. My hope of going to school was to be able to build something. Something that would light up my eyes when I look at it. But now I just have this bitter taste. I have an unhappy relationship with physics and biology as well as other subjects. I just remember being afraid of both of them and not wanting to pick up a textbook on either. I remember physics being so difficult that my heart would drop during each quiz and exam. And all of a sudden my body was fighting itself and then trying to solve physics problems. Biology was difficult as well. I don't know why they made the words so difficult to pronounce. It was like everything was 5 syllables at minimum.
Today I realize the importance of these subjects. How present they are in our everyday lives. Personally, I suffer from chronic acid reflux and a hip impingement. The former affects my overall health and mood and the latter affects general movement. I feel like when I was initially learning those 2 subjects I was intellectually immature (among other things). I feel that if I were to learn them now with some more context, I could develop a different understanding of them. The only problem is trying to find a good way to go about teaching myself these things. I'm running into the road blockers people my age face when trying to learn something new.
First, I have to figure out how do I do it. If I choose to go back to school; Is there a school near me that offers what I want to learn?; How will I pay for it?; Do I leave my job to pursue what I want to learn?; How long will this endeavor take me?; If I choose a school what is stopping it from ending up like the first time I went to school where all I did was get a degree and then a job and not use what I learned in school?; And most important, is this something I want to be dealing with right now when I should be focusing on (blank)? Where the blank could could be any societal expectation like starting a family or health issue or anything really. These are some of the questions people ask themselves when trying to go back to school to learn something new.
If you choose to learn another way such as teaching yourself then you ask yourself a different set of questions. Where do I start? How should I best go about learning this topic? What proves that I know this topic? Can I actually use this information or will this end up being useless? How long do I have to spend on this? What happens when I get stuck, who will I discuss these issues with? There are just as many questions that get created when you choose to learn something yourself as when you choose to go to school.
The point I'm trying to make is that you can have the urge to do something but not necessarily have the means to achieve it. Life is more about scalability and how you choose to phrase your desires. If you want to build something and the idea of building it paralyzes you such that you just don't know where to start then pick a different problem. One that seems feasible and start there. Maybe college is unnecessary here. If we had to wait for every person that encountered a problem to go to college then there would be a lot of unsolved problems. In this case, the act of teaching yourself becomes more preferable. Your solution will discount a lot of perspective because you will have limited resources to bounce ideas off of but the solution that comes out will put you in a state in which you are further than where you were before. Maybe in addition to solving the problem, you answer some of the questions in the prior paragraphs and you rationalize out if going back to school was worth it or not.
At the end of the day you went from a desire to solve, to questions about how you should learn what you need to solve a problem, to this scale down of the problem, to this potential but most likely sub optimal solution, to answering some questions about if you did it the right way. People wake up everyday and my belief is that they want to solve the problems that they face in their everyday lives. But they hit these barriers that feel so large that there is no way to get to the other side. So they end up staying where they are. But if staying where you are makes you unhappy, then all the more reason to push past the barriers you face.