A letter from Apr 29th, 2021

Dear Future Me, I hope you haven't forgotten too much of what you learned in this class! If you still have your Penn google drive, there's a document tucked away with a comprehensive summary of all the lessons we covered (jotted down during the final day). But, for a quicker narrative summary, I thought I'd share what I personally hope you'll remember the most. 1. It's okay to be in the jungle. The most reassuring thing Professor Duckworth said was when she shared with us some serious scholarly research on how long it took paragons of Grit/success to settle into their craft/passion/role. All of them, before they were world reknowned, were hacking away at the jungle of possibilities, opportunities, risks and desires that is personal development for quite a long time (think decades). If you're reading this while still hacking away, take comfort in knowing that this is normal, whether you like it or not. If you've found a way to settle down on a nice spot of dry land, please take the time to comfort those hacking around you by sharing that your life never felt as linear or failure free as it may appear now. If you've pushed away these memories of failure, feel free to dig up the failure resume you made in this course. 2) You can't control your interests so you might as well follow them // interests ≠ passion ≠ talents It can be tempting to commit yourself to whatever you feel passionate about. I know that you feel passionate about universalism, and since your family is almost entirely clinicians, you also care about making larger contributions to the world while retaining proximity to the most marginalized and oppressed. But, whether you like it or not, not every manifestation of these passions will align with your interests. While values are what you believe is important, interests are what spontaneously engage your attention. You might want to be a social worker, like your mother and father and grandmother and grandfather, because you think it's really important and heck – given your legacy, I hope you try it out. But if it doesn't naturally captivate your attention, you shouldn't stick with it. Staying mindful of your interests allows you to find your talents and then race your strengths. Right now, I have the inclination that you probably are pretty passionate about anything and everything do gooder and intellectual, but at the end of the day what really captures your interests is being creative – with art, service and ideas. I hope you honor these observations and whatever else you find out about yourself, no matter how scary it is. 3) Grit is about the long term, like, the really long term Going into this class I know you felt nervous. You forget to turn in assignments pretty frequently, have trouble keeping track of time, and have jumped around a bit in terms of pursuits (cc ADHD). You quit your first job – organizing college kids for the Biden campaign – after three days. Would this class tell you that you're doomed, and bound to failure? No! Here's the thing to remember: grit is about commitment to goals over long periods of time. Hopefully the little low level goals will be easier to stick with when you feel really committed to top level goals. But Grit is about continuing to fight for what you believe in after two, four, ten and twenty years. It's about the courage to keep going through adversity – that's what's important. Think of the head of the World Bank who, just like you, is horrible about paper work. So grit isn't about always sticking with your job, even when there are reasons that make sense to leave. But rather it's about whether you're going to stick to the long term overarching goal of fighting and organizing your heart out to make the world a better place in the decades that follow. 4) You have some new interests --> pursue them! Something drew you to this class, despite whatever obnoxiously anti individualist Marxist tendencies you came into it with. There's something fascinating and grounding about studying individuals, as opposed to getting exclusively bogged down in the abstract language of political economy. Right now you're feeling really interested in thinking about what it would mean to explore the interconnectedness between political economy/sociology and psychology: call it structural psychology. This is something to know about yourself – you care about systems because you care about individuals. You're interested in thinking about what it would mean to engage in psychology while deftly avoiding endorsing neoliberal economic theory. I hope you return to these ideas if you haven't explored this interest already 5) Also - people reallllyyy appreciate gratitude!! - a goal is so much harder without a plan (when --> then) - deliberate practice, changing thought patterns (cc cognitive behavioral therapy) works With grit and gratitude, You Thursday, April 29th 2021