The Best Advice I've Ever Received

A feeling like starting over or beginning anew can bring an amazing outlook on life. Since this new journey has begun, I’ve felt energized and emboldened. A feeling I have experienced every time I’ve started a new job, but more so. More like that first day, I started my last career, which spanned over thirty years. Thirty years is a long time. According to datacommons.org, as of 2021, my life expectancy is somewhere around 76 years. While not quite half one's life, thirty years is nearly so.

A small side note. Thirty-two years is just a little bigger number than thirty. Tomorrow is my thirty-second wedding anniversary. My wonderful wife has been beside me on this wild ride called life, supporting me the whole way. She reads these, and I want the world to know that I love her more today than that hot June Saturday afternoon in northern Indiana when I said, “I do.”

I've been training for the last two years as I prepare to start this next career. This week, I started another course on how to write better sentences. Talk about going all the way back to the basics. I am learning how to put the most important information at the end of the sentence and how to vary the length of my sentences so the reader can feel the story's pace. I wonder if Tolkien thought about that.

I remember sitting in a college classroom wondering how and where I’d use the tools I was learning. How could I translate that classroom experience into something that puts food on the table? Some of those thoughts or fears are returning to me now, too. Will anyone ever buy my books? Will I sell enough to pay back even the small amount of money I’ve spent in this pursuit?  These are exciting thoughts. These are intimidating thoughts. Though I will not be hoping to feed my family on the fruits of my labor, there is also the fear of not being accepted. This is greater than my fear of making money as an engineer all those long years ago.

My undergraduate experience would be called unconventional. I worked full-time in a factory and went to school almost full-time. This is a subject for an entirely different blog post. But my goal at the time was to graduate and pierce that barrier the jobs I desired required—a college degree. With that goal in mind, grades really didn’t matter that much. However, a few years later, I went to get a master's degree, and my goal was to earn a 4.0 GPA and prove to myself that I was smart enough to do it.

My first semester went by, and I hammered it. I read everything that was assigned and many of the recommended readings. I found questions I couldn’t answer, so I reached out and talked to my professors about those questions. My projects were the best in the class, and I don’t think I missed a single point on my exams. Semester one of six was complete, and a 4.0 was granted.

I went through this program with four others who worked in the same company. We grew close and helped each other through the process. They did well, but not nearly to the level I had done. I think if you asked any of them, they would have agreed. They still had that mentality I had in my undergraduate work. This was a barrier to defeat, not necessarily to thrive. Imagine my shock when they, too, were given a 4.0.

Frustration sat in. I went into my advisor’s office and complained. “How could they have been rewarded the same as me?” It was cheapening my degree. What would a person have to do not to get a 4.0? She heard me out. She let me rant. She nodded. When I was done, she smiled and said, “You need to ask yourself why you are doing this program. You should approach it to learn to be better and not to get the best grade. If you do strive to learn these subjects, no grade will suffice to measure what you’ve done.”

I sat in silence and pondered those words for a few minutes. It soaked into my inner core. It was probably the best advice I’d ever been given. If you are trying to learn something, you need to do it for that. Grades are an imperfect tool to compare how well one student did. However, the output of that process and how I apply what I have learned will be more important than any letters on a report card or after your name.

It was nearly a three-hour drive from where I went to school to my home, and I made that drive in silence, thinking about the what-ifs. What if I had applied that principle in my undergraduate program, my work training, or, for that matter, high school, middle school, or elementary school? What have I done? I had thrown those opportunities away.

As I go through this process again, my mission and goal is to learn and apply as much as possible to become the best writer with the time I have left. I don’t know if you will ever read this, but thank you, Dr. Dark, for helping me see education in a much better light.