Tweeting Before Coffee

It seems like this is shaping up to be a writing/thinking day. I woke up late, about 8, this morning, and with Kendall coming into our room and Tia already using her laptop in bed. I grabbed my laptop, checking on SQLServerCentral to make sure things were working.

While doing so, I checked Twirl to see what was happening in my Twitter-verse. I responded to a few tweets and then posted a "the best part of waking up is coffee in your cup. Need to go make some." Someone then responded with "not out of bed yet?"

A few people went back and forth, and it made me think that I was a  little more motivated for work than I realized.

I came downstairs and found this post on Blogging and intellectual craftsmanship, which seems to fit me. The inability to separate my personal life from my professional one has worked well for me. It's quoted in the post: “the most admirable thinkers within the scholarly community you have chosen to join [in this case sociology] do not split their work from their lives. They seem to take both too seriously to allow such dissociation, and they want to use each for the enrichment of the other”. I found the source essay here.

I thought that was very interesting, and it made me stop for a minute. In some ways I am a tiny bit of a sociologist. I read and comment on things, on events, and actions, talking often from the social and human side of things. It's editorializing, but I try to bring more to the link or event with my own thoughts and comments.

And I often draw on my own experiences in order to do so. The separation from my personal life to the professional is thin, sometimes non-existent.

As I finished his essay, thoughts of it still lingering as I moved on with me day, I read an essay that my Mom sent to me called Effort and Understanding: Having It Easy. I'm not sure if this is the original source as I just had the text in email, and it's been repeated a few times around the Internet, but it struck me as well.

I think luck plays a part in success, and it definitely appears that things are easy for some people. What surprised me is when people said that it seemed I had it easy. From my perspective, that’s far from the truth. I’ve worked hard, and I think I have been lucky to have things go my way, but it’s taken hard work.

We build our own world to a large extent. It might be that we have more ups or downs than others, but to a large extent I think it’s our efforts, our understanding of our capabilities, and our acceptance of our achievements that determines how successful we view ourselves.

And I think that our view of ourselves will shine through to others.

When we enjoy what we do, and work at it, to become good, it appears easy on the outside. We appear to be a craftsman that just goes about their daily work.