You are who you decide to be.

Just before New Year’s Eve, 1993, I sat down to write a list of resolutions. Instead, I ended up writing a list of things that would be totally unlike me to do, things that other people do. Over the course of an hour or so, I listed something like fifty skills, hobbies, or accomplishments that were wholly out of character for me. Though I long ago misplaced the list, I recall that it included entries like “learn to fly,” “learn to juggle fire,” “take up rollerblading,” “volunteer for a candidate for office,” “become a good photographer,” “get a broadcasting license,” and “learn to ride a unicycle.”

The creation of this list coincided with my discovery of who they are. You know, as in “why haven’t they cure cancer?”, or “why do they have such lame people run for office?” Turns out they are the people who get off their butts and do what needs doing. There’s not a lot of people out there doing such things, which is why a lot of stuff isn’t done very well. I couldn’t come up with any good reason why I couldn’t be one of them, and maybe do a little better at it.

I set about working on my list. I joined the Civil Air Patrol. I bought some juggling clubs. I invested in a pair of skates. I volunteered for three candidates (all of whom were vying for the same seat, but didn’t seem to mind my triplicity). I borrowed my mother’s K1000. I spent some quality time falling down in the kitchen on my brother’s old unicycle. And so on. As I learned each skill well enough, I crossed it off the list. Though my goal was to do all of the things in a single year, I managed only to get through about half of them. It was a mild disappointment at the time, but I figured I’d keep going.

Ultimately, I’ll bet I accomplished 90% of what was on that list before I lost interest. It’s not that I lost interest in many of my new experiences or skills — on the contrary, many of them remain defining characteristics to this day. But I found that I didn’t need the list itself anymore. I’d simply changed the way that I viewed the world. No longer did I need to be defined by my circumstances — I could define my own circumstances, and create myself in the process.

It’s been a long time since I made that list. I think it’s about time that I made a new one. I already know that I’ll want to put “learn to play an instrument” on there (again), “knit a scarf,” “become competent at sewing,” and “take a watercolor class.” It’s 180° from eating fire and getting a motorcycle (also on the original list) but, then, that’s the idea — to expand who I am.

What will you put on your list?

Published by Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Char­lottes­­ville, VA, USA. more »

9 replies on “You are who you decide to be.”

  1. I had been wondering how I could help provide anti-malarial bed-netting for kids (and adults) in Africa. Bob Edwards (on XMRadio) interviewed a guy several months ago about this subject. The guy (no memory of the name…) said that it’s astonishing the difference you can make in a child’s life and hope of survival by supplying one of these nets.

    (According to the CDC, every thirty seconds another child in Africa dies as a result of Malaria.)

    So, I was delighted when a way to help showed up in my mailbox last week. Harry and I pay a small amount every year to help support a child in Nepal through Plan International. (I mention this so you know that this organization is one I’ve found to be legit, and I know people who have traveled abroad to meet the kids and have seen the good work this organization does.)

    Through their website, PlanUSA.org, you can provide a set of 5 anti-malarial bed nets (for a family) for 25 bucks.

    (My snail-mail catalog explains the details — such as the fact that the $25 buys 5 nets — details that are lacking on the website, which assumes you have the detailed paper catalog. Use the toll-free number listed on the site for more details.)

    There are other options, such as a set of vaccinations for one child for $20.

    (Or, if you’d like to donate a large farm animal, like an ox, in memory of the cow that totalled Chris Makarsky’s Camry last Thursday, you can do that at this site.)

    If this sounds like a way to become someone you’d like to be, I hope this is the information you’ve been looking for.

  2. Your blog entry is about to-do lists (or “to-be” lists) that we make at the end of the year. Who we resolve to be. I’m resolving to be more helpful than I have been in the past to people I’ll never meet.

  3. The guy who Janis heard Bob Edwards interview is Jeffrey Sachs, who wrote “The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time”

    Sachs’ list apparently included “end extreme poverty in the world” and he offers specific, do-able steps to achieve that end.

  4. Interesting guy — I’d never heard of him. Here’s his book, Wikipedia’s entry about him, a Mother Jones interview with him, and the Washington Post‘s review of the book, entitled “A Modest Proposal,” appropriately enough. The Post reviewer, an economist, is no fan of Sachs’ proposal, which he describes as such:

    To end world poverty once and for all, he offers a detailed Big Plan that covers just about everything, in mind-numbing technical jargon, from planting nitrogen-fixing leguminous trees to replenish soil fertility, to antiretroviral therapy for AIDS, to specially programmed cell phones to provide real-time data to health planners, to rainwater harvesting, to battery-charging stations and so on. Sachs proposes that the U.N. secretary general personally run the overall plan, coordinating the actions of thousands of officials in six U.N. agencies, U.N. country teams, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Sachs’s Big Plan would launch poor countries out of a “poverty trap” and end world poverty by 2025, as the book’s title advertises. The world’s rich countries would pay for a large share of the Big Plan — somehow doing an exact financial “Needs Assessment,” seeing how much poor country governments can pay and then having rich donors pay the rest. The donors will fill what he calls the “financing gap” by doubling donor-nation foreign aid in 2006, then nearly doubling it again by 2015.

  5. This sounds vaguely familiar. Is your real name Earl by chance? And, do you have a brother named Randy?

  6. This entry has boggled my mind, but in a good way.

    Skills to pick up that I can’t do now that are totally unlike me… I guess I can put the unicycle thing down. And the juggling. I sort of went through this accidentally in my 20s when I picked up rapelling, caving and kayaking – all things that I should get back to. And after coming from a background of writing and artwork (my first taxed job was doing art by the piece in Slidell, LA) I decided to major in business in college – worse yet accounting. By your definition I think that perhaps I’ve become “them” a few times in my life. What I have to contemplate is what “them” to become next.

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