Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Are all things worth doing, worth doing well?

When I see a book title and look at the cover I try and imagine what the story is going to be about. It never fails that in little more than an instant a story springs to mind and I pretend that is what the book is about. Then I go on to the next title and cover that attracts my attention. This was the case last week at Barnes and Noble when I saw the title “Why A students work for C students.” I still haven’t seen the book again much less read it but the title keeps creeping into my mind and I think, If I were to write the book here is what I would have to say.” This is a fun exercise and when I get around to actually reading the book it is even more fun to see how my thesis compares to the authors’.

As I have explained in the past I have a hobby, which is RC Airplane Models. In this hobby you can scratch build one from a plan (600 hours labor), build one from a kit (400 hours labor), build one Almost Ready to Fly (ARF, 24 hours labor) build one Ready to Fly, (One hour set up time). You can see how labor intensive building an RC Airplane is and today most people buy ARFs which are made in Chinese factory sweatshops and are so affordable that making one the old fashioned way (In a garage workshop) is becoming a thing of the past. An ARF costs between S150 and $300 dollars and does not usually include the electronics, such as the transmitter, receiver and servos and some items that do not package easily like landing gear and the vertical and horizontal stabilizer must be acquired or assembled separately.

Now allow me to digress for just a minute and make a point. When I was growing up my Father used to get upset with me because of this attention deficit problem I had. Sometimes he got so bent out of shape he hit me, thinking I had an attitude problem. As you can imagine my Dad and I were not all that close and I tried to stay out of his way. This was not hard to do because I was not his favorite son. My older brother was big, athletic, handsome and a real chick magnet. (What father wouldn’t love a son like that?)He was also somewhat of a bully and liked to sit on top of me pinning my arms while he spit on my forehead. I really hated it when he did that. Anyway my Dad had some favorite sayings he used to use all the time and one was, “If you aren’t going to it right then don’t do it at all.” I was often of the receiving end of this admonition and I have to admit that I didn’t always follow through on the things I started.

One of these was doing my homework, which followed me throughout my academic career and made me dread going to class. I hated school for as far back as I can remember. I got terrible grades and soon became an expert at learning just enough to get by. My wife (We married the end of our sophomore year) on the other hand was a brilliant student and can leaf through a textbook, seldom spending more than ten seconds on a page before she has a strong command of the material. Then she turns her attention to those girly things that women enjoy doing. She and her twin sister floated through grammar, high shool and college with straight As.

Sorry for the sidetrack but you have to know a little backstory to appreciate what happened one day while I was in Graduate School. Yes, I actually made it through graduate school using my 3.0 and go, academic model. One day the Professor was giving his lecture and he said something that left me dumbfounded. He said, “All things worth doing are not worth doing well.” I immediately took note and for the first time in a long time began paying attention. Basically he was saying that life is too short to reach one hundred percent mastery in everything you take an honest or required interest in. I swear, this boring little bespectacled man, who put everybody to sleep, made my jaw drop open in awe. It was like hearing Moses, down off Mount Sinai commenting on the Ten Commandments. Here was a professor who actually got it… who gave academic credibility to something I had known for years. It was in this same graduate program that I was forced to take a statistics course and I managed to “Plug and Chug” good enough to get a B grade and pass the course. In graduate school, if you are not aware, the minimum standard is a B grade.

Tomorrow I will pick up on this thread. Don’t miss it because I’m definitely onto something.