Despite my recent claims to the contrary, I am still a perfectionist; I want to do the brilliant things I know I’m capable of, and I want to do them all the time or I feel like I’m just wasting time. Unfortunately this just isn’t possible, but how much is acceptable?

That all depends on how you calibrate your feelings, I suppose. My standards have always been set high because I expect great things and I don’t want to let myself down. Lowering those expectations resulted in substandard work which actually made me feel worse – my attempts to increase happiness through decreasing the time spent working clearly didn’t go well. Now I’m not sure the simplistic Play > Work = Happiness equation is even close to being true.

Now onto the topic of this post, “surviving vs. succeeding”. Currently I feel I am definitely in the former category – I struggle through each day, barely in one piece by the end of it, and then pick myself up again the next day to repeat the cycle. I’m not doing well and that makes me feel worse than anything, really; I do genuinely want to succeed at everything I do, even teaching which (at the moment) I absolutely detest. “Just surviving” isn’t an option for me – if I can’t do brilliant things I’d rather not do it at all. I know this is unhealthy, but I tend to flip from one extreme to the other and I think that’s why I’m struggling to find the midpoint between churning out rubbish and creating wonderful things.

The next question is this: How do I move from surviving to succeeding? I’m considering using Steve Pavlina’s “From a 7 to a 10” technique to help me visualise what a 10/10 lesson would look like, and how I can best achieve it. Time management is another issue I really need to get on top of – currently I have no time for hobbies because I’m working so long, but partly that is due to working inefficiently. How can I work more efficiently? We’ll see; I need to try out some systems and see what works for me.

Planning my future is something else that I should do in order to increase my happiness and productivity; knowing where you are is easy, knowing where you want to go is a challenge but plotting a path between the two takes a lot of hard work, sweat and tears.

Surviving goes against the grain with me, but it’s better than not surviving, at least. Making the upwards journey will take a long time, and who knows what’s at the top?