Why do I work so hard?

The question has arose in my apartment, between myself and my roommate why I work so hard. I am unsure if I have figured it yet, but here is my best reasoning.

The evidence for my hard work generally comes in marks. To brag for a moment, I currently have a 3.92 GPA. All through school I have had good marks. There are very few times that I have ever felt let down by my marks.

One basic reasoning would be that I work so hard for the marks; that I am driven to do well because of the marks at the end. This reasoning doesn’t resonate with me. I don’t feel it when I work. I don’t really think about it when I work. I feel good about good marks when I receive them, and I feel bad about bad marks when I get them.

But I don’t work for the marks.

I think the reason I do things can be explained by a different reason. I have a plan. I always have a plan in mind. There aren’t lots of plans. There is a single, giant plan which exist for my life at many different scales. The overarching part of the plan relating to my career is to become an animator/director/technical director. University is the current step of that plan. And in university there are all of my current courses, and each of those courses contains the projects and lectures. Now the big enormous plan of my career requires me to complete all of the smaller pieces of the plan for it to be accomplished.

Right now, I can see the plan roughly two weeks in front of me. All of my homework, deadlines and projects fit into it. It is doable. A fundamental precept of my plan is that it always remains doable. The moment that it isn’t feasible anymore, the plan will need to reshape itself. And it does. My plan will generally reshape itself to accommodate the most important tasks first, like finishing projects and going to class.

So the plan which I am always following is critical to determining what I do. So now the question is why do I do things well? The simple answer is that the question is wrong. I either do things, or I don’t do things. There isn’t anything in the middle. Either it is part of the plan, or it is not part of the plan. The quality of the outcome is affected by the quality of the plan.

If I want to do something well, and it needs to be done well, the only response is to fit it into the plan in a larger way. For most of my animation projects, I feel they are important, so I plan them in an important way. I start them early. I work on them often and I get them done on time. They push less important things around in the plan.

The good marks that I get are only a result of how I work. I don’t strive for fantastic marks, I am simply following the ever changing plan that I have made for myself. It is both flexible and inevitable. I have rarely had it break down because I am good at keeping it organized and well functioning. The last few weeks have really put a strain on it though. I have reached the point where few other things can be put into the plan before it simply can’t sustain the process anymore, and it could fall apart.

But I doubt that will happen.

Appendix: I wrote this post roughly a week before posting it. Since then I feel that just understanding how I work has made me more relaxed. And the plan has been going pretty much as planned, as it always does.

Kyler