A character flaw

A few days ago I mentioned that I wanted to start delving into my faults. I have clearly avoided making good on that promise. And therein lays one of my issues.

I talk a lot. About things I want to do, achieve and become. But a lot of times, that’s all that it amounts to. Talk. Even some of my friends have noticed this and talk about it. I have all these grand ideas that rarely seem to take place. I tend to skew it into a positive light. I say I’m a visionary that needs an implementer at my side. After all, there are tons of people out there who could get a lot of things accomplished if they only had ideas about what to accomplish.

But this fact does not change my desire to be able to do both. Or at least find a reliable implementer…someone to be by my side and support and continue brainstorming and push towards action. I frustrate myself constantly because of all the ideas I have each and every bloody year that never reach fruition.

Take, for example, the idea I had and wanted to put into practice after returning from Russia summer after freshman year. I wanted to see the churches in my valley be able to unite and cooperate to jointly accomplish things. But I only talked about the ideas that I had, I never really did anything until this year. This year, my youth leaders got the ball rolling on a valley-wide worship thing that we did once a month for three months. And then it stopped. But finally, for one the first times I can remember, I stepped up and did something. I got someone else (unfortunately, another visionary…although he’s better at getting things rolling than me) and we gathered student leaders from each church and viola! Every Saturday we meet and make headway on getting something together for June 10.

Alright, so that was a success. Subconsciously I clearly do not want to paint myself in a totally negative light, but that is to be expected. I guess I just kind of forget about all the dreams and ideas I’ve had in the past that for whatever reason ceased to be.

Why do I stop so easily? Because I get frustrated and disillusioned rather quickly. In fact, Mr. A actually commented on that in class the other day. We were holding a mock trial and the prosecution was doing badly. One of my classmates was joking with Mr. A and said that he and I should have been the prosecution. Mr. A laughed and said that I would get too frustrated. He also mentioned that I’d be good for behind the scenes, but up in the heat of things? Forget it. I couldn’t get upset with him because he was right.

I’ve known this for a while about myself. We visionaries? We’re good for behind the scenes. We can think of ideas like nobody’s business, but we need the more forward types to get it done. Not to say that because we’re better behind the scenes we don’t like to speak up and have our voices be heard. No, that’s not the case considering I’m one of the loudest and likely most obnoxious people I know. It’s just that we’re not always the ones to be trusted to get things done.

Oddly enough though, that seems to be mainly my own ideas that don’t get done. When someone is depending on me, I do my job and I do it well. Earlier in the school year when my Honors US History class was approached to take charge of the Veteran’s Day recognition for the school, we decided to put on a slideshow and I was the one who actually put the final product together. I spent over 8 hours on that thing outside of class. Collecting pictures, doing different drafts of font sizes/types and layout sizes. Then organizing and making the slideshow visually aesthetic. If I wasn’t essential in getting the slideshow done I wouldn’t have done it. I also would not have done it if it was just me thinking for myself.

I guess I need outside encouragement. I don’t do things for myself. Sometimes I wish I would, but I don’t. I do things based on perceived outer need and interest in any project I might take on, probably because the risk is not as great. If I were to implement one of my ideas without anyone to support me and devote as much time as I do to things once I get moving on them only to have it fail I would be thoroughly disappointed and devastated. But that’s not to say I haven’t put egregious amounts of time into projects that have flopped.

Maybe I’m too hard on myself. I do try some projects, just not all of them. I try the ones that are super important to me and seem to have the best chance of succeeding. And once I start I give it everything I have. I’m a little passionate and impulsive, maybe even somewhat volatile or maybe capricious would be a word. Whatever the proper adjective for me is, like anything I suppose there are positives and negatives to it. I suppose the main thing is to work on making the trait positive more often than it’s negative.