I have this piece of freeware that gives you random Buddhist sayings. When I'm really confused, it gives me advice. Some may say that divination is a form of crutch, finding outside sources for what should be internal solutions. But I happen to think that people see what they want to see and the conclusions you come to based on divination are actually a form of internal decision making.

It told me yesterday that I should not be ruled by conceit. That I should look toward what is spiritually fulfilling.

This got me to thinking.

As I have thought, and overthought, my quandry about what to study or if I should be formal about it at all, one of the things that weighs heavily in my mind is where my talents lie. I've wondered if I'm up to the challenge of sitting next to someone in class that is brilliant at something and feeling that my own work is mediocre at best. There's a comfort in knowing that one area is a natural area, and that you can wow people with a half assed effort.

But there's a sort of conceit in this. And there's the quandry that comes out of that. If you are the best at something do you really need, or even want, to trudge through the basics and be outdoing your associates with minimal effort? And do you want to feed your ego or do you want to perfect where your passions lie?

And that is where talent becomes something of a non issue.

I remember when my mother got her masters in creative writing. She had always been a sort of small fish in a big pond. Well, she was next to writers who were equal or better to her and she was suddenly the small fish in a big pond. She got her masters without publishing, then locked her manuscripts up in a box and pushed them to the back of the closet. I was only nine years old at the time but it left a very big impression on me. When I asked her why she stopped writing, she said "Because I learned I'm not any good."

| don't want to be a person that stops doing what they love out of fear. I don't want to force myself to be something I'm not, but I don't want to take the easy route out of fear.

And then there's the question of which is worse: being the prodigy sitting in a class that they could teach better themselves, or struggling with a concept that others are more advanced at? Certainly the latter bruises the ego and can be discouraging, but the former bores the mind and sends it drifting off into half efforts and barely concealed contempt.

When I took my flash class, I wanted to animate. I wanted to learn the techniques used in a lot of web cartoons. Sure, I could do a mock up flash web page with little effort but I wanted to use the tools to do a movie. I was horrified to learn that I was forbidden to do this and the class was intended solely as a necessary evil for graphic design majors. By the time we got to the point of anything that was advanced enough that I could even translate it into my own goals I was so bored and disinterested that not only was I not paying attention but I was actually losing my love of the software, and I still haven't been able to recover from that.

Conversely, in my drawing for animation class, it was a lot of students with extensive figure drawing ability. I was initially embarrassed by my lack of technique, but I tried to integrate the teacher's instructions with my own intuitive responses to the models. I was surprised when some really amazing artists complimented me on my style. (And of course, as soon as I realized someone was watching me work, I inadvertadly fucked up the next three drawings that I did.)

So there you go. This is by no means a defining decision, merely a guiding principle. But doing what's easy can be more discouraging and less fulfilling than what's hard. And you never know, as embarrassed as you might get by your own level of development, who might really like what you do.