My brother-in-law recently asked me if I was proud to have graduated college – his exact words were “do you feel accomplished”. In an odd way, I don’t It just wasn’t that hard. My partner tells me that I don’t remember how hard it was on me. Fair enough, I worked hard. That said, I don’t know that I was really challenged. So, why does that take away from the accomplishment.

It takes away from the achievement because I didn’t have to grow to do it. I used only the skills I brought into college to do college. It was just school. I was great at school, and college was never hard enough to force me to get new school skills.

I should qualify that I did get new skills during college. They just weren’t necessary for my degree. College was a catalyst for me to find opportunities that helped me grow.

  • I learned to sell myself, how to shop for a job, and how to interview on both sides.
  • E.P.P.O. showed me how to help others, how to find their strengths, and how to let them shine.
  • Internships taught me about deep work, working on a team, taking critiques, and the value in seeing out long projects.
  • Through the people I met I learned about the world and myself.

That’s all to say, none of the aforementioned bullets were required for the degree. To get a piece of paper that I ostensibly needed – I didn’t have to change at all. If my degree certifies me to be an engineer, then I left high school with the skills I needed to be an engineer. Sure, I learned how to program in college, but every job I’ve had has been in a new language with a new technology. I would have just learned that crap anyway, and I would have done it with my school skills.

So, my feeling of lack of accomplishment in the piece of paper I received from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville comes not from the lack of difficulty, per se, but from the lack of necessitated growth.

A point to wonder: the “growth” described up to know has been only one kind. We’ll call it horizontal growth. We can imagine a skill graph:

Skill Graph

On the horizontal axis, the count or breadth of skills is depicted. On the vertical axis, we see the depth of each skill.

Thus far, the growth that was lamented for lacking was in breadth. Implicit to this, I’m also claiming that the depth of my skills (or vertical growth) also wasn’t very stressed.

Would an acceptable amount of vertical growth have made my degree feel like an accomplishment? What would that even have looked like? A sufficiently hard and complicated subject that would have required a deepening of my school and studying skills; Or maybe just a class that I couldn’t get an A in.

Does that exist? Would it have satiated me? Should I have gone to M.I.T.?

When I left for college, my dad sat me down and told me that I was a big fish in the pond I was in, but I was about be a very little fish in a very big pond. Frankly, the pond didn’t end up being all that big. In hindsight, I thing going to a bigger pond might have made me a better fish.

What have I been proud of?

My whole life has not been without accomplishment. I’ve done things and been proud of them. While I don’t think as highly of myself as perhaps my mother does – I’m pretty alright.

The following are, hopefully, a wide breadth of things I’ve been proud of. They are all meant to be illustrative examples of things that have made me grow.

  • Book club:

    I’ve been out of school for 3 years now. Something they don’t tell you is that one of the best things that school gives you is a bottomless supply of community. Maybe some people struggle to make friends, but everyone goes to class and sees people. Now, that’s gone, and adults hate each other.

    So, a huge goal of my twenties seems to be to build community. I’ve done this in a few ways, but a big one has been starting a book club! It has been frustrating and a kind of hard that I didn’t know existed, but oh is it oh so fulfilling. I’m endlessly proud to be a hub for people to meet and make merry.

  • Looking Glass:

    In September of 2023, my climbing partner and I did The Nose on Looking Glass mountain in North Carolina. This is a famous first time multipitch climb in Pisgah National Park. It was a bit over 400 ft of climbing. Without a doubt it is the most afraid I’ve ever been. But, I did it.

    Working through all the fear, anxiety, and near panic attacks was so very hard. To have not given up on that climb is a huge personal achievement.

  • Me n May:

    Mariah and I have been together for 7 years. It isn’t easy to keep love going for that long, but we have. I’m very proud of us and our lives.

    Empathy, understanding, and listening to one another have been key in growing together. What’s more, learning what not to do has been just as important.

    Maybe we love each other for all time.

  • Tofu as my familiar:

    Mariah and I have two cats: Tofu & Miso. I love them both equally, of course. However, Tofu and I have much more history. We spent two full years together when I worked from home.

    What her and I have is something so deep. When I cook she’ll sit on the counter, and I will let her smell the ingredients. She knows how to get my attention and tell me if she’s hungry, cuddly, or ready to play. I’ve worked hard to cultivate her curiosity, and she has always been excited to be with me.

    Cultivating her love and trust is something I’m very proud of.

  • UART @ Garmin:

    At Garmin I wrote the firmware the power system of one of their products. It was cool – if not a little easy. However, they wanted to run a specific communication protocol over the UART on the power chip. The first pass for how we did it (using the chip mfg documentation) was terribly slow. We couldn’t send nearly enough messages, not to mention how flaky it was. So I set out to make it better.

    Through alot (and I mean weeks) of reading the manual, staring at the chips memory map, and trial and error, I found an undocumented feature on the chip. I found it, worked out how it work, and went on to make it into the protocol feature. It worked perfect.

    This is a great example of the pay off of deep work.

  • C.I.F.T.:

    C.I.F.T., or the “Control Interface Functional Testset”, was a fixture for testing pcbs at Siemens – my first internship. This went from me adding a few features to me leading the whole project. I completed the test fixture to make it production ready and lead the release. This was my first full engineering project. It forced me to see the face, ugly or not, of what engineering is.

What can I be proud of next?

First off, I can all but guarantee that this section won’t end with a definite answer. If it did, this entire article wouldn’t exist.

While the list above isn’t a full enumeration of everything cool I’ve done in my life, it is a collection of unique-ish things. They sort of stand to stake out what I’ve grown to do in life. Looking at them all, what do they tell us:

  • doing hard things is fulfilling
  • doing new things is fulfilling
  • growing to overcome myself is the well of accomplishment that never dries out
  • community and people are fulfilling
  • connection is fulfilling

With this in mind, what’s next? It’s worth saying that neither breadth nor depth is everything. If I try everything in the world, then all I’ll know is everything I don’t know. If I go as deep as I can on one thing then I’ll be like people who no life W.o.W.

Hank Green once described his brain as a shrub and the more curly and entwined the branches are the more the shrub can hold. I just want a bushy shrub, and I want my shrub to be in a garden of other bushy shrubs.

I want to lead a full life. I’ve grown to appreciate the fullness of leading those lives with other people who are full too. So, the next thing I will be proud of will be something that gives me richness, depth, and connection.