Being TOO good on my feet
I have a problem. I’m good on my feet. I don’t mean Fred Astaire graceful, but rather good at talking on the spot. I’m a great interviewer. (Getting the interview in the first place is a different story.) But there’s a problem with all of this. I’ve gotten way too comfortable trying to live on my feet alone.
I had a presentation for class a few weeks back where I didn't get to quite finish the last slide, which was a circle filled with points mapping to another circle filled with points. There were only a few points in each circle, though I intended for the circles to be well filled. As a cover, I pulled up the screen, behind which there was a whiteboard, and I filled out the circles with the help of our small audience. The move was a big hit and everyone thought it was a great presentation technique.
+1 for quick thinking
-1 for deep comprehension
A few weeks before that I had another presentation. It was 10 minutes long and I did it with 2 other people. It looks like the other groups put in many hours of work to polish and lock down their presentations. We put maybe a grand total of 1:15 of real work into the presentation and it came out pretty well. In fact, I called a last minute audible and presented an extra minute of wrap up at the end because I could tell we were running short.
+1 for looking polished
-1 for not actually being polished
I’m very good in theory classes in being able to ask what seem somewhat like insightful questions. As my girlfriend is very keenly aware of, I think out loud. I process through information by having a conversation about it. In that process, I ask a lot of questions, some of which hit the mark as “great.”
+1 for interesting questions
-1 for internal comprehension
This theme runs my life. I’m good at getting things done on the fly. What results tends to be decent work, though not necessarily exceptional. But the problem is that there is a lot of positive reinforcement I get from being able to do this, or at the very least a lack of negative reinforcement. So on and on I go.
The problem with this all is that I’m realizing that I’m not quite as good at thinking about problems deeply, creating rich solutions, and carefully articulating my responses. In the first presentation, part of the problem was that I didn’t really know what I wanted to put on that last slide. In the second, I spent the minimal amount of time to get something done instead of really thinking about what I wanted. In the last, I leave the thinking to the classroom when I talk and forget about it until the next session.
It makes me wonder what I’m missing out on. It’s not that I don’t think there is an appropriate time and place for the sort of behavior that I exhibited above. Rather, I want to know how to properly appropriate that behavior and, more importantly, know what the opposite sort of behavior is. What would it be like to really finish a project deeply, with nuance and revision? And how do I get there? Hopefully I learn to be more careful in the future.
posted by Eugene Chang at 10:12 PM
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