Joseph Cavelli
Dollieslager
11/9/15
Creator versus Victim
The Creator vs Victim mindset is a strong battle in the minds of many young adults and students. Should they take the easy route and fall “victim” to Victim idea and language, or should they push the extra mile and carve their own route to success as a Creator? We all have the ability to be Creators; some of us may be natural born Creators that have a driving passion for our work that pushes us to succeed, others may suffer from Victim tendencies and try to place blame on someone or something other than themselves for their shortcomings. Dr. Skip Downing defines and highlights what it means to be both in his work On Course: Strategies for Creating Success in College and in Life which also includes some helpful tips for getting yourself back on course to succeed.
Mirman’s idea of Creator vs Victim is rather simple; those that think like a creator will often find new ways to succeed in their goals and, as a result, will be more likely to advance and become successful in their lives. This is in contrast to a Victim who attempts to lay blame on someone or something else and, as a result, won’t really get anywhere or progress any further than the point in which he or she is already at, and have less of a chance of reach the success that a Creator can reach. More specifically Mirman brings up Dr. Skip Downing’s work in which Dr. Downing separates the mindset and the mental language of a Victim and a Creator. To him, a Creator is someone who asks themselves “what can I do to achieve my goal?” whereas a Victim asks themselves “whose fault is this”. Mirman makes a point that we should all look towards avoiding the use of Victim like language and instead begin thinking with the same mind of a Creator so that we may ultimately open ourselves up ad train our minds to reach greater success.
More recently I rarely play a Victim. I've grown to take responsibility for any actions I take or things that I say, but when I was younger I very often played a Victim role as I was rather lazy and didn't ever do anything more than minimum effort, and if that didn't work out for me than it was someone else's fault, or if I did something that shouldn't have been done and I had an accomplice then I would always try to put all the fault on them. Normally these aren't things that I tend, or choose to remember, so I have very little in the way of examples on my mind, but I can recall one point in which I played a Victim, more so because it was one of the more recent occurrences. At my high school, most work was done and turned in online through the Google drive suite, this allowed for students to turn in work and also have class outside of school, they also changed late work policies to be more or less nonexistent, quite simply students had to turn their work in on time. Well one week, close to the end of the year I had an issue with connecting to the internet to turn in some work that was due, so I just simply didn't do it and tried to put the entirety of the fault on the internet issues afflicted me; which I later found out was my modem a super simple replacement fixed it; though instead of simply not doing that I could have exported a word file to my phone and uploaded it from that for example, but I didn't. I simply didn't do it and turned it in late.
If there was one person who I think best embodies the traits of a Creator I would have to say that it was my old scoutmaster John Triska. He would always find a way to accomplish a task, he set out to complete. One weekend we went on the camping trip to a park, I can't remember the name, but, due to traffic we showed up very late and the gates were closed, instead of turning back he called the owner of the land and found us a way in around the gate. He was also a great role model to use to become a Creator; he wouldn't take "no", or I can't do it for an answer because he always believed there was a way to get something done, and would normally push other members of my troop to try to find the hardest way to do something first because it would make for a better lesson than just doing it the easy way right of the bat.
This is so far my first semester of college courses, so everything is rather new and unknown to me in how things work. That being said, I started developing decent Creator like habits in the halfway through my high school sophomore year and throughout my senior year. With my first semester schedule, I have about 8 hours a free time that I am on campus each week, and I’m going to be using these hours to complete my assignments and study for any tests or quizzes that I may have coming up, which is what I’ve been doing so far. On Tuesdays I’m in the library for 3 hours between my SDV which ends at around 9:15 and my ENG course which starts at 12:30, and it gives me a chance to work on assignments and study in a rather quiet and distraction-less environment. On both Mondays and Wednesdays, I have about 2.5 hours of free time between my Stress Management and World History class that I spend normally working on my MTT and stress management course work. I also keep one of my laptops and my phone with me on campus so realistically I can work from anywhere if I really needed to do so. Another habit which I started using in my last years of high school were online resources like Kahnacademy.com among others which proved especially helpful for my math courses which are a subject I hadn’t really ever done too well in before. Lastly, I developed a hard schedule of sorts; my idea was that if I make myself adhere to a strict daily schedule of when to do certain things rather than just doing them when I feel like it, it would help improve my study habits, so while my day to day schedule with college isn’t the same as high school where every day my classes started and ended at the same time, I feel I can still make something work out.
I feel that, for the most part, I have been covering my desired outcome fairly well. I've been using those large blocks of free time I have even though it's changed a bit due to schedule changes after the 8-week mark. I've been able to complete all my World History assignments and quizzes during this period, as well as getting the stress management assignments done as well in the same time blocks. My SDV class is over now and I'm able to get a decent portion of the English coursework done in class, and the rest at home as needed. I've been thrown a few curveballs, one being we had a teacher exchange midway through the semester in world history and now I must adjust from the old way I had done work in that class to the new way, the other being my laptop's AC adapter broke and almost lost the use of my laptop until I would be able to get a new adapter, which would have seriously impacted my ability to follow through, on the whole, idea that I can do work from anywhere, however I was able to get the AC adapter fixed before it became a problem. There have been a few occasions I dropped the ball, most recent one being that I left my USB flash drive at home on Tuesday, October 13th and that drive had all of my English work that was due that day on it, luckily none of that work was to be turned in any way due to the issues with the printer, so that was a mistake on my part and could have gone pretty poorly had the printer worked.
Works Cited
Downing, Skip. On Course: Strategies for Creating Success in College and in Life. 7th ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2014. 42-44. Print.
Mirman, David. "Do You Think like a Victim or a Creator?" You Are the Prime Mover. N.p., 2 Jan. 2012. Web. 10 Sept. 2015. <http://youaretheprimemover.com/2012/do-you-think-like-a-victim-or-a-creator.>