Focusing On What Doesn't Work Instead Of What Does
There's a habit I keep noticing, in myself and in whole institutions: we fixate on what's broken rather than on what's going right. It wears you down. It defeats you before you've started, especially once you begin measuring yourself against other people's yardsticks. Can a person ever move forward that way? Can a country?
That same reflex is why the news feels so heavy. Reporters go looking for the wrong, the failing, the scandal, and we absorb it. People do the identical thing to themselves and to each other. Back in school I made a point of deciding for myself whether a teacher was any good, rather than swallowing someone else's verdict whole. A classmate might call a teacher far too strict; I'd sit in the same room and find that teacher fair and reasonable.
A while ago I watched a segment about a principal who took everything he'd figured out about how children actually learn and poured it into his own independent middle school. The place thrived. He'd written a book on his approach, and the earnings from that book went straight back into funding the school.
What usually happens to small independent schools that succeed? They don't become the template for the next round of schools. Charter schools run into the same wall. Even when one is doing well, the funding gets pulled toward schools that are struggling, because that's where the money is said to be needed. The ones that work end up starved so the ones that don't can be propped up.
Maybe the smarter move would be to pay committees to go find the things that already work, instead of paying them to catalog problems and then throw money at those problems by recycling solutions that have already failed. We tend to rediscover problems we were perfectly aware of and then treat them with worn-out ideas. That's good money chasing bad.
Creativity gets smothered in this process. Anyone with a stake in the current way of doing things has a reason to resist being made obsolete, and the institutions built around those old methods feel the threat and dig in to protect the status quo. I wonder if that's part of why big government, once it takes root, is so hard to trim back.
The same trap catches individuals. People sink years and savings into a path that looked right at the time, maybe because a parent did it, maybe because it promised money or security, and then they discover their real gifts were somewhere else. They master the profession and still never shine the way they'd hoped, particularly when they stack themselves up against someone whose temperament actually fit the work.
One of my daughters, possibly both, love being outside. The one I'm thinking of never landed a job in the field she majored in; she drifted into something else that also let her work outdoors, work she'd been doing part time all through school. The thing she taught herself out of plain interest turned out to satisfy her far more than her major did, and she'd earned good grades and gotten through a stack of science courses for that major.
My own road here has been long. I kept finding work I enjoyed and was good at, and it pulled me away from the seriously mentally ill population and toward ordinary people, which is more or less what I'm doing on this site. My strength shows up most when I follow what feels right and let my own creativity lead, rather than marching through established routines. For years my shaky confidence steered me away from those strengths and kept me chasing whatever I imagined the establishment expected of me.
A few of those strengths: reading drawings and using them inside therapy, and a style of diagnostic interviewing where I let the person I'm talking with steer things by what they say and do. Hypnosis and relaxation therapy were others, worked from a loose outline shaped by the goal of the session and whatever diagnostic picture I had going in. Staying flexible, reading what the particular person in front of me needed, mattered more than any fixed script.