I don’t have class on Fridays, but they are inevitably my busiest days. I can’t explain why I go through the week with a moderate amount of responsibilities each day and Friday ends up as the Superbowl for meetings, but it’s a fact of life, so I suck it up and deal with it.
Last Friday I had a few meetings (read: more than I would ever want at the end of the week) to attend in the late morning, but I wanted to sneak a run in before hand.
Being a typical college bachelor, I needed to iron my shirt and pants that were balled up in the corner of my room before my morning of meetings, but I was confident I would have time to take care of that once I got back.
I was wrong.
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I got back from my run a little later than I anticipated (read: five minutes before my meeting). When I walked into my apartment, I knew something was wrong because my roommates were twiddling their thumbs. They weren’t glued to the TV playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for the 50th consecutive hour, and though I’m certain their girlfriends we’re rejoicing, they looked confused.
They said something happened to the power a few streets over from our apartment, and the power was mostly out. Yes, we were at about half power. Don’t ask me how it happened—I’ve never seen anything like it before (I now assume it was the blogosphere’s way of telling me I hadn’t posted in over a week, and it thought I could use some inspiration).
When I flipped the light switch in the bathroom, the half electricity rumors were confirmed. There was no harsh, bright light blinding me, and I wasn’t deafened by the fan that sounds like a jet preparing for take off in the bathroom. Instead, we had a nice aurora and a quiet hum that nearly put me to sleep.
Rather than stepping into a bedroom filled with buzzing electronics, it was like walking into a TV repair shop—some items were clicking and sputtering away while others laid motionless as if Y2K just happened all over again but with all of the crazy speculation actually coming true.
I tried to use my iron, but there wasn’t enough juice to power it, and I didn’t have time to play Battleship with my power strip to find the right spot to get it to work.
I decided to worry about the shirt after I took my shower. I went to hop in, and, following the trend of half working, we had no hot water. I settled for a one-leg-in, one-leg-out shower that lasted all of about sixty seconds.
After leaving the apartment with half a shower, a half wrinkled shirt, running half an hour late to my first meeting, I started thinking, “How many things in life do we do at half power?”
How many relationships do we put half of our effort into but expect to see a fully charged benefit?
How many papers, assignments and tests do we prepare for half-heartedly and haphazardly, but expect to get an A for effort?
How many does do we just put our lives on cruise control, not going out of our way to put full effort into anything we’re doing?
Why do we settle for half of our effort and believe the lie that we’re too busy to complete something with 100 percent energy?
I’m a big believer in the “anything worth doing is worth doing right” mentality. Why even bother doing something if you’re not giving it your all?
The power outage was frustrating, but even more frustrating was my realization of how I often put half of my energy into a swing of the bat when life is throwing me a 90-mile-per-hour fastball; ****every once and a while I might make contact, but more often than not I’m going to look like an idiot when I inevitably whiff.
Stop half trying and expecting full positive results. If you’re going to do something, do it right—the results are worth it.