Showing up is half the battle

I recently had the pleasure of enduring PMT 250, program management tools, the latest selection of training force fed down my throat in an effort to teach me how to buy pipes. PMT 250 is taught by Defense Acquisition University (DAU), a hallmark institution that prides itself in being the Harvard of Fort Belvoir. Normally, DAU classes consist of 6 to 12 modules with about 150-300 PowerPoint slides apiece. You login to DAU and these slides are firehosed into your face from their central abacus at about the rate of one every 20 seconds. If you do the math, that means the average course takes approximately 17 years to complete.

I’d like to adjust this rant for a second and address the phrase “the value of the course is in the discussion.” First, the value of the course is never in the discussion because chances are the people in your class aren’t any smarter than you, and in the case of DAU, probably much less so. Do you think that a professor in a computational fluid dynamics course stands up in front of his class on the first day and says, “Well I know some of you might not understand the material and might not ever get anything right…but the value of this course is in the discussion.” No. The value of the course is pounding Navier-Stokes into your brain until you understand that PDEs were a contrivance of Satan himself. There is no discussion on the finer points of whether or not Bernoulli was good at BJs, just lots of math and headache. I know what some of you are saying, “Zoids, what about classes for people who don’t ever find a job, like English literature or philosophy?” Nope, sorry, same rule applies. The value is in reading Socrates and trying to wrap your head around what he is trying to say, not listening to some asshole in the corner pontificate his reflections upon bong hits. So when Professor Asshole tells me that the real value of this program management shitshow is in listening to Francis over at Army Logistics Center discuss his intrepid ventures into cost accounting the latest pencil contract, my brain shuts down.

A further adjustment to this rant brings us full circle back to the purpose of this blog, namely, lifting heavy shit. This type of phrase, “don’t worry about getting X, just doing Y is good enough,” is repeated in many other infuriating circumstances, but this one…

Know that showing up is half the battle (courtesy, Gold’s Gym)

Furious anger.

Yet another brilliant abdication of personal responsibility, thank you Gold’s gym. I showed up at the gym and waddled on the treadmill for 30 minutes, but at least I showed up…and that’s half the battle! Look, I get it. For Joe Couchington showing up is pretty hard due to the fact that his familial love for his namesake is constantly convincing him to watch TV all day. But immediately upon making Joe suffer by running wind sprints he realized showing up didn’t matter shit, running the first 50m of the 100m was really half the battle.  But then he had to run twelve of them so really running the first six was half the battle. Then when he went home and realized that he only burnt 400 calories and he really realized that showing up meant absolutely nothing. What they are saying is commitment to do something is half the battle, but really commitment is a useless wafer-thin construct of words much like love or grief. The only commitment is where you have 500 pounds on your back and you are currently at the bottom most position on squat, you have a COMMITMENT to stand back up or you will DIE. That’s half the battle.