I am a big fan of the new book Stay Sane in an Insane World by Greg Harden. If you haven’t heard about it, it is written by a sports psychologist who worked for several decades at the University of Michigan. Among the athletes Harden impacted were Heisman Trophy winners Charles Woodson, Desmond Howard, swimmer Michael Phelps, and a young quarterback named Tom Brady.
I can vouch for this. Although I had not heard of Harden when I was entering graduate school at age 39 for the second time, I recognized that for better or worse, I had to do well in the area where I had formerly done poorly. In my graduate program, I was going to specialize in the ancient languages of biblical Greek and Hebrew. As part of the program, we were required to have a total recall of the arcane language rules. (You would not believe how many rules involved the accents of Greek words…am I boring you?)
I took several years of biblical Greek courses as an undergraduate. Still, the unfortunate fact was I found the language so dull that I gave my minimum effort and received “Gentleman B’s.” In my second go around, I had a professor who is nationally known as a tremendous Greek scholar. He was also like the Nick Saban or Vince Lombardi of Greek professors: no-nonsense, detail-oriented, and expecting nothing but the best.
I knew this professor challenged his first-year students in such a way as to weed out those who were not motivated or not cut out for the program. I was desperate to succeed, so months before classes began, I bought a copy of the textbook that my professor would use. It just so happened that a biblical scholar from Greece (a Greek from Greece!) had produced an audio tape working through the entire textbook. With that textbook and tape, I worked through the whole course before classes began. The preparation was so valuable that the first-year course felt like the performance of a play after a complete dress rehearsal. To reinforce what I had learned the previous months, I pasted my handwritten notes of language rules, vocabulary words, and verb conjugations on our primary bathroom mirror throughout that first year. Our oldest girls have childhood memories of those notes plastered all over that mirror.
Don’t get me wrong. I had no talent for languages and had never enjoyed studying them. But for once in my life, I accepted an academic challenge and sought to do my very best. It paid off. Our mid-term and final exams each consisted of 500 questions (remember, the professor wanted to weed students out.) Thankfully, I received the second-highest score on my midterm exam (498 questions answered correctly) and scored second in my class again on the final (498 correct again). A different individual scored first each time, with 499 and 500 answered correctly, respectively. But that was okay because I had done my best. My effort also set the tone for my graduate school experience all the way to completing a doctorate. Since I chose to dedicate myself to doing well in the areas I had initially hated, I could embrace and thoroughly enjoy the areas I loved.
I shared this with you because I am sure there are certain things about your job that you hate doing. Choose to do them well. Offer your very best. If I could do it, you can too. And consider reading Greg Harden’s book Staying Sane in an Insane World.