The Triumphant Return

This post started as a script for a vlog--oh, by the way, I've been doing a vlog called English Majors Talking (or English Major Stalking) and you can find it here.   After a disastrous two-hour attempt at editing, iMovie crashed and I lost everything.  I still have the footage, but I don't really feel like reliving that experience, so it's not getting edited.  But rather than have it be a complete waste, I thought it might be worth putting up here.

I noticed that as our videos get later and later it becomes harder to actually post the video, and I have a theory to why that is (at least for me).  And to talk about this, I want to use Randy Moss.  (Yes, that Randy Moss).  

I think we’ve been sort of conditioned to believe in the triumphant return--you’re away for a while, but then you come back better than ever.  So take Randy Moss.  I always thought he was overrated, but he’s still a solid receiver and officially, he’s in retirement.  But he’s said that he’d consider coming back to the NFL for a team with a playoff bid.  (Disclaimer: Since writing the script, I saw an article in which he announced that he had no intention to return, but I'm sticking with the example to make my point.  Besides, you know how often retirements stick in the NFL.)  He’s not looking just to play--he wants to put up great stats late in the season and send a good team all the way through.  He wants to have a triumphant return to the NFL, and you see it all the time in football--Brett Farve tried and it didn’t go so well, but Michael Vick returned and dominated. When you pull it off, you're practically a hero--you get a clean slate.  If Randy Moss comes back and does well, we forget that his last season was mostly a game of "No, you take him" in which he accomplished very little.  Instead, he becomes the underdog who came back and proved himself. 

And we see that everywhere, not just in football.  The first time doing something outside in the summer needs to be epic after a long winter.  You need to go do something crazy if you haven’t seen a friend in months to make up for lost time.  I think we’re conditioned to believe that the longer the lead-up, the better things need to be, so as we fall more behind there's much more pressure to do well.

But like Hank Green said in the Wednesday's vlogbrothers, sometimes a bad decision is better than no decision.   Sometimes you just have to put it out there and move on.  We might not have anything spectacular to make up for lost time, but we can at least stop more time from being lost and there’s a lot more value in that than people (like me) realize.  It just doesn’t make a great narrative--which makes me wonder if people like writers aren’t especially prone to making bad decisions because subconsciously they realize that the story will be that much better.  Not only do we over-value the triumphant return, I think sometimes we intentionally do poorly because we believe we can set one up.  It's a stupid risk at best, and it's without a doubt a waste of time.

Triumphant-Return-Syndrome has definitely had a strong impact on my written blog as well.  I tend to have pretty large gaps between posts; if after two months, nothing has been interesting enough to post enough, how is today any different?  And that’s a hard habit to break, but I know that I need to.  I'm beginning to believe that the best kept secret to success is that it's often disguised as mundane work.