Smashing the cup
There’s an old story about Diogenes, the philosopher. An early proponent of simple living, one of his few possessions was a cup for drinking out of. One day he spotted a shepherd boy making a cup out of his hands to drink from a stream. Diogenes smashed his cup and ashamedly declared that a child had beaten him at plainness.
It’s trivially easy to claim some principle as your own without making it one of your central tenents. “I am a hard worker”, you tell others, but in the depths of your mind you can remember all those times you slept in rather than finish what you were working on or all those times you stayed up late “working” on reading some pointless blog articles. Or maybe you try to convince others that you are an unconditionally dependable person without thinking back to those phone calls you ignored and emails you conveniently “forgot” to answer.
It’s ok, most of us are guilty of not sticking to our guns all the time. It’s expected. You can flub here and there and still be considered to be an upright, honest person, but as a proponent of self-improvement and of embracing the lifestyle of the person you want to become, I think it is important to be cognizant of where you are succeeding fully and where you might be dropping the ball. Like Diogenes, we need to be ready to break our misconceptions about who we are and to throw our comfortable habits to the wind if that is what it will take to reach the next level of discipline. The principled person needs to be ready to reinvent themself when they finally realize that it is necessary.
When I first embraced software development, two years ago, I thought I knew what kind of person I was. I had spent years reading, thinking, discussing and contemplating life, virtue and discipline. When it came to throwing myself into something outside my comfort zone, the walls I had thought I had built up, the things that I thought made me a “better” person, were revealed to be nothing but speculation. After a couple of years of truly hard work, I have finally come full circle to the thoughts I used to have, now with fresh perspective. Thoughts, ideas, words, they are all easy to produce. Principles are easy to spout off. Realization is so much more difficult. You have to be willing to see goals to their completion. You have to be ready to smash your cup.
