Theme

I was talking with my husband about a manuscript of mine, another one that I have to totally rewrite, and he said something very interesting. He said hIS advisor once told him that “if you don’t work has hard as you can nothing will ever get done.” Just how hard is “as hard as you can?” I mean should one take time to rest, eat and exercise, let alone time for leisure. Statements like these startle me, but if anyone would say something like this I would expect it to be my husband’s former PhD adviser. Just to put him in context, he is likely in his early 50’s, Australian born-US (dual) citizen, married to a women of the same nationality-citizenship, without children and he had a few different positions in industry before being a professor, the professor position he didn’t apply for-he was solicited for. He is very well known in his field. He host really great parties, tells lots of fun stories about him being drunk and he use to play rugby (my favorite part about him).

But I digress . .. . I don’t want my husband to turn into this guy (except for the fun party part). I want my husband to work hard but to then come home and relax. He is always thinking about work, at least in my opinion. I have often thought that I need some more of my husband’s dedication and he needs some of my ability to goof off.

I also want to work hard but currently don’t think I am doing this. I’m easily distracted and easily discouraged. I define working hard as focusing your thoughts and energy to a given cause at a given time, so then, the time I’ve designated to work is roughly 8am-630pm (minus lunch break and exercise break, about 2 hours total) and during this time I should be completely focused on my goal *to publish manuscripts and graduate* although a better goal would be *to understand my topic of research and contribute knowledge to the scientific community*

Can you see how different these two goals are? I had a very interesting conversation with my husband’s uncle over the holidays. We talked about how I am a very goal orientated person and I can get fixated on a goal and get frustrated when it doesn’t get met, i.e. submitting a paper but the coauthors keep wanting to change it. He made a very good point that I understand in concept but is difficult to implement since I am goal orientated. He said if one focuses on doing the best you can at each task that gets you to the goal then you can get that task done and accomplished and move on to the next task and viola, once all the tasks are done you have met your goal. I guess this is something like living in the moment and not thinking too far ahead into the future.

I had started this post indenting to talk more about this manuscript that needs to be rewritten but I will save that for another time and instead choose a theme for 2008 like other bloggers have done before me.

**TO LIVE IN THE MOMENT**