"Until the job is completed successfully"

I have a spreadsheet on my computer with a list of 57 goals that I am working on right now. Each day, I open the sheet and the program randomly generates one daily goal, which I then try to make a part of my life for 24 hours.

I smiled when I opened it last night and saw that today’s would be “I work hard until the job is completed successfully.” Today was exam study day, and I spent nearly the entirety of my waking hours working through homework problems and pouring over pages and pages and pages and pages of study material. Even then, I only got a little more than halfway through the material, so I’m going to have to get up really early Monday morning and get more done before my 11:30 am calculus exam.

So, while the job is not "completed successfully" at this point, I am confident that "I work hard" is basically an understatement.

No longer a runner-up in life

This showed up in my inbox today for my recent economics exam:

Name: Tyler Heasley
  You scored: 33 out of 40 for 82%
  You ranked: 7 out of 129 who took this test
Average score: 23.2 +/- 6.4 (std.dev)

And then I saw elsewhere that my grade for my statistics exam was a 30/30, giving me 100%.

Needless to say, we are very happy in the Heasley household right now. After a crazy, somewhat aimless year of casually defined professional goals, I am back in school and being blessed for diligent effort. It feels great to be going somewhere.

Look at my effort, not my work

14 out of 15 points. That’s what I received for the homework assignment I submitted this afternoon in calculus. After what was probably about 12 hours and 10 submitted pages of homework (spread over three days at about 4 hours a day), I got 14/15, earning me about a 93% for the assignment. If assignments were graded on effort, I would have a 15/15, but I can understand that in 12 hours of calculus I must have done at least something wrong.

I’m okay with it. We’ve had two assignments graded so far this semester and my point total is 29/30 to date, so I’m feeling good about this whole calculus thing. I was nervous that I would fall on my face because it’s been so long since I took a full semester of calculus, but now I’m pretty confident that, with the Lord’s help—which, I’m convinced, I am receiving an immense portion of—I can do this with an A. Not an A-, an A. My end goal after three years of school is a job, of course, but it is also a higher GPA than what I had with my first bachelor’s. I want to show employers an improvement from my first degree, that I have made progress, and that I am capable of doing amazing things. And since I won’t be taking a full load any semester I am here (except one, I think), I’m pretty certain this is a worthy, reasonable goal. I mean, right now things are going well in all of my classes, calculus included.