This is a message for the upcoming generation.
That whole time was a blur, and I don't really remember it that well. Pretty sure it was around 1996, 1997... All I remember is that it was grade 9. I had a lot going on at that time in my life.
I had always been a socially awkward nerd, I didn't have a lot of friends because we moved around a lot, and then my parents split up, and the internet really came up to its own.
It was a lot of fun. This was back before things got super commercialized so you could still do things like start conversations with random people on icq. Even when we didn't have PPP dialup there was a local dialup text internet that used lynx. It would be a long time until people really understood the allure of the internet -- for most people computers were just those nerd things. For me, there was a promise that you could go out there and with enough patience you could find a little bit of information on literally anything under the sun. I skipped dances because I couldn't dance, and I imagined looking up dance online. It just seemed like you could find anything.
Among certain groups there's been a push to deem the older part of gen Y as a separate sub generation. The reason is that this small cohort was born before the widespread proliferation of the internet but ended up relatively early in life being exposed to computers and certain very low Fidelity versions of the internet. There are people within the millennial cohort who grew up with iPhones and high-speed internet. The idea of using a modem and tying up your phone line to connect to a text-based system you used your keyboard and only your keyboard to navigate is an absolute anachronism now, but at that time it was considered pretty cutting Edge. Obviously text terminals have been around for decades but the application of it to the internet was a relatively new thing.
There was also a certain naivete that came from growing up in this age where stuff that was absolutely impossible a few years ago suddenly became possible. There were lots of scam programs out there such as one that claimed it would update the firmware on your CPU to turn a 486 into a Pentium, or when that claimed it would use memory compression to double the amount of memory that you had, or a lot of other weird programs that often turned out to be malware in disguise.
On the other hand, a lot of those seemingly miraculous programs turned out to be entirely real. Around that time emulators were becoming more widespread, whereas previously if you wanted to play an Atari 2600 game you would have to own an entire 2600, and if you wanted to play Nintendo game you would have to own a nintendo, for the first time you could just download a program and play these console games for free (the legality of that sort of thing hadn't quite set in yet, don't try this at home kids)
Early on in your childhood, even getting your hands on a shareware game was kind of an event. You get your allowance, go to the nearest store and there would be all kinds of magnetic diskettes for sale for five bucks and each one would have the trial version of a different game on it. There were also compilations of games on CD-ROM that could contain thousands of little tiny games many of which were fully free and just created by people who enjoyed making games.
Eventually though, you got bored of the game on the diskette, and even the countless games on the CD-ROM eventually you would get to know every one. That stands in stark contrast to the introduction of the internet, where there were literally more games than you could possibly download. At 9600 bits per second that was literal too.
One thing that people forget about computers back in that time is just how sketchy they were. Depending on the era you never really had to worry about a fan getting all filled with crud, but the main operating system of the day was Windows 95, and Windows 95 likes to destroy itself. It always looks really nice in a demo, but that demo is usually running on a computer system that is perfectly stable for months or years at a time. I recently built a Windows 98 PC and got to remember just how dodgy it all was -- you would set everything up right properly, it wouldn't work, so you'd start all over again reinstall everything and hope for a stable install this time. Absolutely nothing changed but every so often you got a good install for a little while. God help you if your computer crashed because your file allocation table would get corrupted and you would lose a bunch of data. Modern journaling file systems are a godsend.
The point of mentioning all this isn't to go off into the weeds regarding how interesting computing was back then. The point is to show how interested I was in computing back then. Not only how interested I was, but the fact that it was a very time-consuming Hobby. He would constantly be reinstalling Windows or downloading some file or trying to rebuild your computer for the 11th time with a slightly different configuration that you think might work better. And it was a lot of fun. Although the modern internet and modern computers are better in almost every way, the unpredictability and the massive rewards for getting things right made it very addictive.
From the time I was very very young people were always telling me how smart it was. I took it to heart a little bit too much and frankly got a little bit of a weird complex about it. When you're young and you're growing up and you know that you are basically just like everyone else but maybe a little bit worse you grab on to anything you can get.
On top of that, I had serious problems paying attention in school, I was constantly playing around at my desk fiddling with things drawing and margins of my notebook just doing anything to try to make the day go by a little bit quicker. In spite of that, I always seem to make it to the next grade. Between that and hearing so many stories of people who were just pushed along because that's the way you do things in the 90s, I had convinced myself that there was simply no way I could fail.
That year of grade 9, without really intending to I seriously tested that theory. I stayed up late playing on the computer pretty regularly. Often I'd sleep in and miss school. When I did go to school I would end up just sleeping at my desk. I knew there was some courses that I wasn't doing great in, but I just convinced myself that I had some kind of amazing plan in mind that was going to magically make it all come out in the wash without any additional effort from me.
In reality I kind of had a feeling that things weren't so good, but I just figured things would work out. During summer vacation I said a little prayer to myself and went on with my day. I figured failure wasn't really an option, anything if it was it couldn't be a big failure.
Well, failure was in fact an option.
There were certain classes where I didn't like my teacher and I figured I was going to fail. Social studies? Hated that shit. Constantly being snippy to the teacher, was seriously a little jerk. On the other hand, I was sure I had certain classes in the bag. The one I was certain I was going to do well at was science. No matter how little work I put into it I figured I was just going to do good at science. Probably do okay at math, swing a d-, and I always did it good at English so that was not going to be an issue...
I figured that failure wasn't an option.
So the first day of school came and for whatever reason throughout the entire summer they didn't bother sending me my report card. Wasn't until the first day of school that I finally got my hands on that report card. Until then I thought that failure wasn't an option. I was wrong.
Math? I thought like a 27%. Social studies, pretty sure I was in the single digits. English? 30%? Just course after course after course I was getting my ass handed to me, and then I finally made it to science. 48%. My favorite subject and I managed to fail it.
That hit me like a ton of bricks. It's a lesson that I brought with me to this day: failure is an option and it sucks. No matter how smart you are, no matter how talented you are, no matter what your fundamental aptitude, if you don't put in the work you will fail.
I was staring at the report card imagining myself in class at 30 years old still trying to graduate. When you're at grade 9 that is a scary prospect.
That was when I decided it was time for a change. I doubled down, and worked really hard. There were periods that other folks got to take a break, I was doing correspondence courses. During my normal classes I was doubling down on trying to make sure I was catching up. The last thing that I wanted was to end up that vision of failure that I finally had in my head.
The story gets pretty boring from here because putting your nose down to the grindstone isn't sexy. It isn't fun. On the other hand, putting your nose down to the grindstone and working really hard works. Thanks to hard work and a little bit of luck not only did I manage to graduate on time, I managed to graduate on time on the honor roll, getting straight As and in some classes getting near the top of my class.
The time that I spent having a little vacation was something I ended up paying for for the rest of my high school career. Lesson learned.
My generation is one that has always been told that all you have to do is basically do what you're told and success is just going to find you. You were told that you cannot fail, as long as you trust someone else's plan. There's been a lot of people who ended up inadvertently making massive sacrifices in the future, for example by taking out massive student loans for programs they didn't really think too hard about. Then they just took whatever job without thinking too hard about it because they were told that just by going to college they would end up becoming rich. Pretty much no one ever became rich by being someone else's flunky and just following orders.
Sometimes failure is an option through no fault of your own and you have to figure out what you're going to do about it. After I graduated from high school I worked for about a year for a school board, then ended up off on an unemployment for quite some time before I got the worst job on the planet for a few months before I finally had enough money in the bank that it was time to go to college. At that time I thought that moving down to Ottawa was going to be a good plan, my mom lived down there and I thought that it was going to work out because I had no concept of what a really big city was actually like. I thought that everyday I might spend half an hour commuting, in reality often it was more like 5 hours. I gave it my best, but I just wasn't succeeding. The extra 5 hours was really key to being able to succeed and I didn't have it. Besides that, often my commute would be interrupted because the people who are driving me home weren't ready to go home yet and so half my day I would spend in an environment that really wasn't conducive to studying. There were a whole bunch of times where I called up my stepmom for advice, trying to figure out some solution to this spot I put myself in. Eventually she said to me "you know what you need to do, now it's time to do it". In that moment I realized that I did know what I needed to do. There was simply no way I was going to succeed if I continued on with what I was doing. I had already flunked out of a lot of important courses, and there was no way to get out of it. I went to the college and dropped out and pulled the remainder of my tuition out. I went back to the worst job on the planet for another 6 months or so to rejuvenate the savings that I'd burned up, and then I came up with a plan that included a lot more self-reliance. I would be able to basically live my life without needing to worry about other people giving me rides, without having to wait for the person who did the drive to get me there, and definitely without a 5-hour commute. And I went out, and it was incredibly hard at times but I did it.
There are a number of generals throughout history who are famous for winning themselves into defeat. I often like to talk about the difference between the strategic and the tactical. Tactics are the moment to moment movements that you do to try to make it through the next little bit. Strategy is the big picture and what you do to try to make it to the absolute end goal. A tactical genius can win every battle but lose the war. A strategic genius can lose every battle and win the war.
Failure is an option. Sometimes it's an option worth taking, if failing today means winning tomorrow. It's very important that you are making a conscious decision to fail rather than just allowing it to happen using strategy as an excuse for not trying.
So to sum up, failure is an option. Ultimately though, failing sucks. If you work hard you can have a better chance of not failing. If all you ever do is to listen to exactly what you're told and never think for yourself you can't succeed. Sometimes you fail and it isn't even your fault. And sometimes you have to accept failure so that you can win another day.
That whole time was a blur, and I don't really remember it that well. Pretty sure it was around 1996, 1997... All I remember is that it was grade 9. I had a lot going on at that time in my life.
I had always been a socially awkward nerd, I didn't have a lot of friends because we moved around a lot, and then my parents split up, and the internet really came up to its own.
It was a lot of fun. This was back before things got super commercialized so you could still do things like start conversations with random people on icq. Even when we didn't have PPP dialup there was a local dialup text internet that used lynx. It would be a long time until people really understood the allure of the internet -- for most people computers were just those nerd things. For me, there was a promise that you could go out there and with enough patience you could find a little bit of information on literally anything under the sun. I skipped dances because I couldn't dance, and I imagined looking up dance online. It just seemed like you could find anything.
Among certain groups there's been a push to deem the older part of gen Y as a separate sub generation. The reason is that this small cohort was born before the widespread proliferation of the internet but ended up relatively early in life being exposed to computers and certain very low Fidelity versions of the internet. There are people within the millennial cohort who grew up with iPhones and high-speed internet. The idea of using a modem and tying up your phone line to connect to a text-based system you used your keyboard and only your keyboard to navigate is an absolute anachronism now, but at that time it was considered pretty cutting Edge. Obviously text terminals have been around for decades but the application of it to the internet was a relatively new thing.
There was also a certain naivete that came from growing up in this age where stuff that was absolutely impossible a few years ago suddenly became possible. There were lots of scam programs out there such as one that claimed it would update the firmware on your CPU to turn a 486 into a Pentium, or when that claimed it would use memory compression to double the amount of memory that you had, or a lot of other weird programs that often turned out to be malware in disguise.
On the other hand, a lot of those seemingly miraculous programs turned out to be entirely real. Around that time emulators were becoming more widespread, whereas previously if you wanted to play an Atari 2600 game you would have to own an entire 2600, and if you wanted to play Nintendo game you would have to own a nintendo, for the first time you could just download a program and play these console games for free (the legality of that sort of thing hadn't quite set in yet, don't try this at home kids)
Early on in your childhood, even getting your hands on a shareware game was kind of an event. You get your allowance, go to the nearest store and there would be all kinds of magnetic diskettes for sale for five bucks and each one would have the trial version of a different game on it. There were also compilations of games on CD-ROM that could contain thousands of little tiny games many of which were fully free and just created by people who enjoyed making games.
Eventually though, you got bored of the game on the diskette, and even the countless games on the CD-ROM eventually you would get to know every one. That stands in stark contrast to the introduction of the internet, where there were literally more games than you could possibly download. At 9600 bits per second that was literal too.
One thing that people forget about computers back in that time is just how sketchy they were. Depending on the era you never really had to worry about a fan getting all filled with crud, but the main operating system of the day was Windows 95, and Windows 95 likes to destroy itself. It always looks really nice in a demo, but that demo is usually running on a computer system that is perfectly stable for months or years at a time. I recently built a Windows 98 PC and got to remember just how dodgy it all was -- you would set everything up right properly, it wouldn't work, so you'd start all over again reinstall everything and hope for a stable install this time. Absolutely nothing changed but every so often you got a good install for a little while. God help you if your computer crashed because your file allocation table would get corrupted and you would lose a bunch of data. Modern journaling file systems are a godsend.
The point of mentioning all this isn't to go off into the weeds regarding how interesting computing was back then. The point is to show how interested I was in computing back then. Not only how interested I was, but the fact that it was a very time-consuming Hobby. He would constantly be reinstalling Windows or downloading some file or trying to rebuild your computer for the 11th time with a slightly different configuration that you think might work better. And it was a lot of fun. Although the modern internet and modern computers are better in almost every way, the unpredictability and the massive rewards for getting things right made it very addictive.
From the time I was very very young people were always telling me how smart it was. I took it to heart a little bit too much and frankly got a little bit of a weird complex about it. When you're young and you're growing up and you know that you are basically just like everyone else but maybe a little bit worse you grab on to anything you can get.
On top of that, I had serious problems paying attention in school, I was constantly playing around at my desk fiddling with things drawing and margins of my notebook just doing anything to try to make the day go by a little bit quicker. In spite of that, I always seem to make it to the next grade. Between that and hearing so many stories of people who were just pushed along because that's the way you do things in the 90s, I had convinced myself that there was simply no way I could fail.
That year of grade 9, without really intending to I seriously tested that theory. I stayed up late playing on the computer pretty regularly. Often I'd sleep in and miss school. When I did go to school I would end up just sleeping at my desk. I knew there was some courses that I wasn't doing great in, but I just convinced myself that I had some kind of amazing plan in mind that was going to magically make it all come out in the wash without any additional effort from me.
In reality I kind of had a feeling that things weren't so good, but I just figured things would work out. During summer vacation I said a little prayer to myself and went on with my day. I figured failure wasn't really an option, anything if it was it couldn't be a big failure.
Well, failure was in fact an option.
There were certain classes where I didn't like my teacher and I figured I was going to fail. Social studies? Hated that shit. Constantly being snippy to the teacher, was seriously a little jerk. On the other hand, I was sure I had certain classes in the bag. The one I was certain I was going to do well at was science. No matter how little work I put into it I figured I was just going to do good at science. Probably do okay at math, swing a d-, and I always did it good at English so that was not going to be an issue...
I figured that failure wasn't an option.
So the first day of school came and for whatever reason throughout the entire summer they didn't bother sending me my report card. Wasn't until the first day of school that I finally got my hands on that report card. Until then I thought that failure wasn't an option. I was wrong.
Math? I thought like a 27%. Social studies, pretty sure I was in the single digits. English? 30%? Just course after course after course I was getting my ass handed to me, and then I finally made it to science. 48%. My favorite subject and I managed to fail it.
That hit me like a ton of bricks. It's a lesson that I brought with me to this day: failure is an option and it sucks. No matter how smart you are, no matter how talented you are, no matter what your fundamental aptitude, if you don't put in the work you will fail.
I was staring at the report card imagining myself in class at 30 years old still trying to graduate. When you're at grade 9 that is a scary prospect.
That was when I decided it was time for a change. I doubled down, and worked really hard. There were periods that other folks got to take a break, I was doing correspondence courses. During my normal classes I was doubling down on trying to make sure I was catching up. The last thing that I wanted was to end up that vision of failure that I finally had in my head.
The story gets pretty boring from here because putting your nose down to the grindstone isn't sexy. It isn't fun. On the other hand, putting your nose down to the grindstone and working really hard works. Thanks to hard work and a little bit of luck not only did I manage to graduate on time, I managed to graduate on time on the honor roll, getting straight As and in some classes getting near the top of my class.
The time that I spent having a little vacation was something I ended up paying for for the rest of my high school career. Lesson learned.
My generation is one that has always been told that all you have to do is basically do what you're told and success is just going to find you. You were told that you cannot fail, as long as you trust someone else's plan. There's been a lot of people who ended up inadvertently making massive sacrifices in the future, for example by taking out massive student loans for programs they didn't really think too hard about. Then they just took whatever job without thinking too hard about it because they were told that just by going to college they would end up becoming rich. Pretty much no one ever became rich by being someone else's flunky and just following orders.
Sometimes failure is an option through no fault of your own and you have to figure out what you're going to do about it. After I graduated from high school I worked for about a year for a school board, then ended up off on an unemployment for quite some time before I got the worst job on the planet for a few months before I finally had enough money in the bank that it was time to go to college. At that time I thought that moving down to Ottawa was going to be a good plan, my mom lived down there and I thought that it was going to work out because I had no concept of what a really big city was actually like. I thought that everyday I might spend half an hour commuting, in reality often it was more like 5 hours. I gave it my best, but I just wasn't succeeding. The extra 5 hours was really key to being able to succeed and I didn't have it. Besides that, often my commute would be interrupted because the people who are driving me home weren't ready to go home yet and so half my day I would spend in an environment that really wasn't conducive to studying. There were a whole bunch of times where I called up my stepmom for advice, trying to figure out some solution to this spot I put myself in. Eventually she said to me "you know what you need to do, now it's time to do it". In that moment I realized that I did know what I needed to do. There was simply no way I was going to succeed if I continued on with what I was doing. I had already flunked out of a lot of important courses, and there was no way to get out of it. I went to the college and dropped out and pulled the remainder of my tuition out. I went back to the worst job on the planet for another 6 months or so to rejuvenate the savings that I'd burned up, and then I came up with a plan that included a lot more self-reliance. I would be able to basically live my life without needing to worry about other people giving me rides, without having to wait for the person who did the drive to get me there, and definitely without a 5-hour commute. And I went out, and it was incredibly hard at times but I did it.
There are a number of generals throughout history who are famous for winning themselves into defeat. I often like to talk about the difference between the strategic and the tactical. Tactics are the moment to moment movements that you do to try to make it through the next little bit. Strategy is the big picture and what you do to try to make it to the absolute end goal. A tactical genius can win every battle but lose the war. A strategic genius can lose every battle and win the war.
Failure is an option. Sometimes it's an option worth taking, if failing today means winning tomorrow. It's very important that you are making a conscious decision to fail rather than just allowing it to happen using strategy as an excuse for not trying.
So to sum up, failure is an option. Ultimately though, failing sucks. If you work hard you can have a better chance of not failing. If all you ever do is to listen to exactly what you're told and never think for yourself you can't succeed. Sometimes you fail and it isn't even your fault. And sometimes you have to accept failure so that you can win another day.
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