Jeremiah Tolbert

Here are the new roles I’ve pinned up beside my desk.

1. No more bitch­ing and moan­ing online.   If you don’t have some­thing pos­i­tive to say, don’t say it at all.
2. Pretend to be pos­i­tive until you are pos­i­tive.  I hear good things about “Fake it til you make it.” We’re gonna try that.  It is not my nat­ural ten­dency to see the pos­i­tive.  Change your nat­ural ten­dency. Hey, you learned to eat some veg­eta­bles, so this can’t be that hard.
3. Nobody owes you any­thing, so don’t ever act like it.   You are not the cen­ter of the world.  You are not a unique snowflake.  No big deal.
4. Try harder.  Fail.  Try even harder.  Failure is just a word for ‘learn­ing expe­ri­ence.’  It’s not some­thing you can “be.”
5. Talent is just another word for skill.  It can be sharp­ened like any­thing else.
6. You will not wake up one morn­ing and mag­i­cally be more awe­some.  You are good enough to do what­ever you want, but it isn’t going to come with­out tremen­dous work.
7. You like work­ing.  So it all turns out okay in the end.
8. You are not your job.  Jobs are clothes we wear, not who we are.
9. Stay hum­ble if you do find suc­cess. Hubris is unat­trac­tive on fat guys.
10. Laugh!  Life is about laugh­ter and joy, not sor­row and self-​​pity.  You have a sense of humor.  USE IT!

To those of you who I’ve frus­trated or upset with my atti­tudes lately–I will try harder. Thank you for stick­ing with me through my roller coaster of emo­tions.  I’m deter­mined to make it worth your while in the future.  I must be kinda awe­some for you to put up with it.  So I coin this attempt in self-​​improvement “Project Awesomeness.”

Project Awesomeness is now  in alpha release.   We’ll call it beta when I think I’ve installed half the rules/​features into who I am.   Then we’ll have a party. A big one.  With stream­ers and balloons.