The Great Shift

For four consecutive years of my life, I have been in the workforce. I have been moving from deliverable to deliverable, working towards my KPI, networking with colleagues within my industry, travelling from one site to the other, engineering, supervising, managing and so much more. It has been a journey that I have been lucky to experience and depending on the angle you look at it, it should have been longer or shorter.

Every day, I wake up with a good idea of what my day would be like. Should I get in on time and get a good parking spot in my office’s compound or should I get in late and have to park in a compound at the end of my street. This was not really a direct decision I made, but they were two most frequent possibilities for how my day would start for those four years of my life.

From then, I would walk to my chair, seat, probably spend the first hour of my day catching up with my colleagues then it is time to get work done. For the most part these were things I knew how to do or there was a relatively fixed process into finding out how to get things done. So, my work wasn’t monotonous but there was a kind of pattern to it, I managed to fall into my groove.

Not so abruptly, things changed. I turned from a worker to a student. My main role changed form doing to learning. Any person who had switched from the life of a worker to a student knows this. I won’t say I was stuck in my ways but after not being in a school setting for over four year it was a shift for me. And, I would imagine that the longer that you’re out of school, the harder (relatively) it is to adjust to life as a student.

I’m not sure how easy it is for everyone else, but for me, it is much easier for me to tunnel my focus into implementing a particular concept than learning that concept. I have a wandering mind – “very” if I had to qualify it, so my biggest hurdle is engaging it productively. Right now, as a student, productivity is seen in me learning and understanding the new topics and concepts I have been exposed to. As you may have noticed, this is where the problem or like some people want to call it, the opportunity surfaced. Well, I am not some people so it’s a problem.

 Engaging yourself for something that isn’t to your inclination doesn’t come naturally to everyone, me included. I would say this was my biggest challenge in my transition from worker to a student, but it is something we all must do because life sadly isn’t that generous. We all must do things we do not enjoy, things we do not like, things that make us uncomfortable, things that we perceive we do not gain anything from. It’s just how life is, we can’t brood over these things nor can we fight the power or in a more agreeable term, go against the grain. We just have to push forward and do things right. We don’t have the luxury of not doing things but since we have to do them, we might as well do them right. Really, that’s the mentality I forced myself to have and although I’m not where I want to be yet, it is a step in the right direction.