Anna Fora, Modern Mythology, 4/2/23

Atomic Habits & Growth

• At this current point in time, what specific standards have you set for yourself?
• How and why did you come to craft these standards?
• How do you demonstrate resilience towards achieving these standards?
• How do you assess yourself? What adjustments do you make? How often?

April has begun—the third to last month of my senior year in high school. And just like every other senior at Staten Island Technical High School, I’ve survived college applications, college decisions and the massive workload all academically challenging classes give. After experiencing the senior academic trenches, I understand why this feeling has been given an infamous name: senioritis.

However, I have a slower and weaker effect of succumbing to it than others. Although my mindset has already implemented senioritis, my actions refuse to sit idly when another homework assignment is due. My standard of never putting low effort into my work and relationships stands resilient in the face of (almost) everything. I’m unsure when I decided upon this standard, but I can recall implementing it as far back as elementary school. A lot of psychological theories swirl in my mind to try and make concrete sense of it: my mom conditioned me to be hardworking, I’ve grown up in a gifted kid environment and my mindset has adapted to it, it’s simply my temperament because my mother thinks the same way, and so on. And even more swirling theories try to explain why I never deviated from this standard.

Nevertheless, what I know for sure is that I have never felt the feeling of deliberately producing subpar work on my accord. Trying to imagine that scenario scares me. And so the prevailing theory on why I don’t trust myself to take an assignment or relationship lightly is that I fear the judgment I’ll receive from the affected party. Because although I can blame the accident of not seeing a due date for a missed assignment or being busy with other work for not dividing attention among my friends or family, I would have no one to blame but myself.

So even though I haven’t felt a day where I wasn’t preoccupied with school/college work for a couple of weeks, I still put in the effort. I still hold to my standard. My stubborn cling to this standard has positively and negatively affected me. On the one hand, I can (most of the time) say I’m proud of the work I produced, and so can the affected party. On the other hand, clinging to this standard hasn’t been kind to my energy levels. I’m all too familiar with what happens when I reach my limit for tolerance on sparing effort. Although I’m still young and probably have only scratched the surface of how much of the adverse effects I can handle, I recognize that I have to change this standard while still keeping its core value true.

I’ve changed this standard a bit over the years, especially after quarantine. Maybe I’ve already changed it as much as the standard can go without sacrificing the effort of my work. I’m not sure. But as of now, my standard and I are still standing. In the face of creating a 5-minute documentary from four 30-minute interviews in one weekend, emotional arguments with my friends and mother, or trying to understand that college rejections don’t mean I wasn’t enough. I’ll keep trying. I know that the things and people I care about deserve at least that.