Like anyone, i suffer from boredom. However the difference between me and somebody else is that when i’m bored, i’ll create… i won’t read or play games or watch TV…
I’ve worked extremely hard to eliminate ‘wasted’ time from my day but by doing that i’ve wired myself to be active from morning to night which means i need to create even more to keep myself busy. Which is good. Some of the results can be seen first hand on this blog 🙂
Don’t get me wrong, i’ve tonnes of assignments and different things i could be doing, but the problem is they’re just not interesting. And that’s a big problem. College is becoming ‘work’ which kills motivation and enthusiasm…. i don’t have that problem at home because everything is just ‘play’ to me. Take this blog – it takes more energy and time to produce posts here daily than it does to complete one assignment, but given the choice i’ll always blog first even though it’s certainly not the easiest option.
I think the core problem is the fact that i know any assignment work i do will go virtually unnoticed. Putting in a huge amount of effort in to an assignment that will be looked at once, then dumped and forgotten about isn’t very ‘rewarding’. I’ll still do it and i’ll still pick up the marks, but my heart isn’t in it and that’s my problem, but it’s also the system’s problem. I’m sure there are a lot more like me…
With a blog post, i know that if i put in the effort, i get rewarded in the form of traffic, comments, retweets etc… plus the entire internet can see what i write and perhaps benefit from it…. so that ‘potential’ exposure definitely makes me up my game. The reward is more personal. The development and results are ‘real’, they can be seen by you, I or anyone who’s online.
If my exams or assignments were put up online for all to see and forever etched in to my online history, you can be sure i’d put a hell of a lot more effort in to everything because i’d know there’d be more at stake. What about attendance… if that could be accessed by future employers…. i’d attend more or at least be more conscious of my attendance.
Ethical? Legal? Probably not but overall there needs to be either more reward or more punishment, or both. As things stand, everything is offline, it’s old school, it’s unrewarding which lowers motivation.
I can see why grade inflation is being talked about these days… i do think (in general) we’re becoming smarter at getting results, not necessarily becoming smarter or working harder. If more reward for creativity was introduced, it might just force people in to not just working smarter, but working harder too.
That's interesting – you mention that the other post on 10 things to blog about is “worth more” than this post, but I would disagree – I would find more things to trigger thoughts in my brain with this post, so therefore its “worth more” to me, regardless of how many page views it might receive.
Seth Godin had a great post about eyeballs and attention today: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/03…
I find a lot of the popular posts these days are top 10 this and top ways to do that, but being honest and giving readers an insight into your life and how you think about things, is always much more inspiring to me.
Just an opinion.
Good point and i'm like yourself in that i prefer more personal content (i'll return to personal blogs more than generic / community blogs).
Interesting post by seth too but at the same time he acknowledges the fast and furious world that is the internet and in order to draw people in to deeper content, you have to lure them in with headline grabbing content sometimes. The 'build it and they will come' approach isn't something we have the patience for in 2010, but yes, it is true 😉
I'll often close links within seconds of opening them, but the fact i opened those links in the first place shows that i was just skimming and filtering headlines… people are lazy and unfortunately the lists and shallow content get spread around more so that's why they tend to get more traffic – driven purely by social media.