DC — S1E3 — Short Term Sacrifice
Season 1 · Episode 3
Good morning, dear readers! We have now been in DC for around a month; four chapters into our reading assignment, and four weeks into our internships. As we close in on the halfway point of the program, it is a good time to talk about this week’s topic: the short-term sacrifices we make for long-term goals.
I consider myself a well-disciplined person, but like everyone, I think I fall somewhere between the extremes of present bias and pure long-termism. Being in a new environment especially brings plenty of challenges. I’ve never lived in a city before — simply exploring one as peppered with history as DC could take up a whole summer. There’s a strong temptation to journey out and visit museums, parks, and new neighborhoods. With my bus pass, it’s ever so easy to flit away on a new adventure after work. In the moment, that always seems far more exciting than the readings I should trudge through for my internship or the write-ups I owe every week. But those tasks, and the skills they build, are undoubtedly what will serve me in my future career. It’s just so easy to lose sight of far-off objectives when you’re out on the street and the weather is perfect.
The book we’re reading offers a solution to this problem: by bundling short-term enjoyments together with long-term tasks, you can make each one serve the other. These pairings make the unpleasant pleasant and turn procrastination into something a little more productive. The example in the book is listening to audiobooks while you work out. A bundle I plan to bring to my own life is taking my internship readings to a park and working through them under the trees. A quasi-bundle would be holding off on leaving the office until my writing is done, and then being free to spend the rest of the evening however I choose. Both strike a balance between what I want to do and what I have to do. They take things I already need to find time for and make them a little more appealing. I’d do them either way, but now I can actually look forward to them.
Finally, a piece of advice for future Capital Scholars: seek that same balance. The city is an incredible resource — the history, the people, the walkability. You should enjoy your time here, and you should have fun. You should never feel like you’re no better off than you would be working an internship back home in Arizona. If you start to feel that way; escape more, experience the city more. But on the other hand, don’t let the city distract you from why you came. Maintaining a balance is harder than it sound. Everyone does Capital Scholars for a reason. For me, it was to make connections and experience work in my future field for the first time. On the days when DC pulls me away from that, I have to pivot and re-evaluate. Last week, I stayed in a meeting until 9 PM finalizing research. I could have been any number of other places, but it was worth it to sit in on the kind of roundtable discussion that shapes a research project, the kind I’m sure I’ll be part of dozens more times over my career.
Thank you for reading, and see you again next week.
— Blaise