Humbled
I haven’t felt the way I’m feeling right now in a very long time.
There’s this feeling of invincibility you get when you’re in a job for a couple of years. You get quite secure in your knowledge, you’ve built confidence over the years. You get into this comfortable zone where you’re pretty sure you can handle whatever gets thrown your way. It’s possible you lose motivation to do the best job you can at what you’re doing, but you increase your reliability and, most of all, your efficiency.
As soon as you get thrown into another environment, though, that feeling of security fades, and the higher the stakes, the harder it gets to feel comfortable in your actions, even when you’ve performed them hundreds of times before.
Yesterday, I did a very important test that might decide (in part) where my life is headed for the next couple of years.
I prepared for it quite well, going through all my resources again, setting up a test environment that let me experiment and refamiliarize myself with tools I hadn’t used in a while. All in all, I don’t think I could’ve prepared much better than I did. I was resolved to do this right, it was of the utmost importance.
When I received the assignment, I read through it and thought to myself “Awesome, this is very doable”. I felt incredibly nervous, though, and as I got started began to doubt myself very heavily. I got sloppy, second-guessed myself constantly and made mistakes I would never make in my comfortable work environment, where I perform exactly the same tasks.
In my opinion, I messed up quite badly, and I didn’t deliver the quality of work I would want to deliver a real customer.
But it’s out of my hands now, there’s nothing I can do to fix it anymore.
I needed this reality check quite badly, I realize now. It’s really dangerous to get too comfortable in your job, lest you lose the ability to adapt to changes.
If I could do it over again, I would do a much better job. But I can’t. That’s life.
Live and learn, Liz.
