my self evaluation

New years seem to go faster and faster with every preceding one. Before, I have done some sort of survey that shows what I have accomplished or learned over the span of the year. However, I've decided to just write about certain things because I feel that it is more revealing about how things really are going.

2008 can best be described by one word: change. I watched as an entire nation began to rally around a president for the first time in my lifetime. I saw disturbing anguish, unbridled joy, and all sorts of in betweens. I met some amazing new friends and watched time rip away the old ones that I had. I begun to realize how difficult it is to foster human relationships over long periods of time and distance. Thankfully, I spent most of 2008 as a happy person. For about a month and a half I was bogged down worrying about a girl that ended up not being worth my time. Otherwise, I learned a lot from both school and working as a fund manager over the summer. I had the experience of turning 21, which still lives as the second best weekend I had during my college experience, second only to the syracuse trip we took earlier in the year. All in all, I have to say that 2008 was the best year that I've had in a long time and I'm just beginning to understand what it takes to truly be happy.

I heard somewhere that the most difficult evaluations are the ones that we are all eventually forced to give ourselves. So here goes. I've never really done this myself, but I have a feeling that it's going to be cathartic to do this. First and foremost, I've realized that I need to control my temper. There is a fine line between being passionate about things and letting my temper control my actions. For the most part, I'm able to do this, but there are still some situations that I get into and I allow my emotions to take over and get the best of me. As an aside, I remember a story from my childhood that demonstrates this perfectly. When I was a younger kid, I participated in hitting leagues in indoor cages. During the entire season, we were one of the worst teams in the league. However, when we got into the playoffs we began to hit very well and ended up making it all the way to the championship game. We were winning big until the bottom of the last inning when the other team came back and ended up winning the game. Despite the fact that there was nothing I could have done, I stormed out of there and refused to shake the hands of the other team or the people running the league. As it turns out, a few years later I tried out for a local all star team and one of the people that had run the league was one of the assistant coaches. To make a longer story shorter, I did not make the team, yet learned a lesson as I looked back that people will forget events, but they will never forget how you acted towards them. In essence, I need to learn how to keep myself peaceful enough on the inside that things that are happening outside of my control won't affect my mood. Furthermore, I need to stop worrying about things that are not that significant in the grand scheme of things. I have learned that by concerning yourself with the unimportant you tend to overlook or cause something that ends up being very significant. The most important thing for me is to try to take an unbiased view of things that are happening around me and figure out which of them are important. Finally, I need to learn to let go of things in my past that I can no longer change. This is perhaps the most difficult of the three as I am always left wondering what could have been had I taken a different course of action or not so. In the end though, that only goes so far as everything comes to a head at some point and things that have happened will have ended up the way they were eventually. In conclusion, I just have a few things that I would like to try to improve upon as a person and I will gradually take steps towards acheiving those goals now.


Until next time,

mh