Speedrunning College: Four Years Later, A Conclusion

Plus a few months, but who's counting?

Four years ago, I wrote not the most-read essay of my time online, nor the one closest to my heart, but what was certainly the most immediately impactful: Speedrunning College: My plan to get a Bachelor’s degree in a year. I know at least three people who, as a direct result of my essay and its companion articles, started and finished their own degrees. It was a dubious honor to see all of this happen while I was quietly struggling to care about my own, but an honor nonetheless.

It would be wiser, in many ways, for me to avoid writing this article. That is the way of things, after all: we trumpet our successes and whisper our failures, shouting out our ambitious plans before silently making concessions to reality. Future employers or admissions committees can find this, after all. More pertinently to me, perhaps, those who I hope will take my writing seriously can read this and know precisely who I am; those who wish me ill can wield it as a weapon.

But having invited a horde of faceless strangers to view this fragment of my life, I feel they ought to see the whole of it, particularly as even now I get the occasional request for an update. I write this because I know those around me make the same social desirability calculations I make, present their own optimistic stories while living their own complicated realities. I write, in short, to convey the world as it actually is, for the sake of those who experience it as I do.

This will be a personal essay, and an uncomfortable one, among the most personal and least comfortable ones I have written.

With that ominous preamble out of the way, what, then, happened to my plan to speedrun college?

The Experience of Speedrunning

For nine months, I remained on track: distractable at times, disjointed at times, but speeding through course after course, ticking each one off in turn with little friction or tension. Read a textbook, drill the material, complete a test. Simple. I even wrote nice essays updating people on my progress—three weeks in, a month after that, and a couple of months later.

Then, for three years, I stared at a tiny list of remaining courses. None of them was particularly difficult. None of them was particularly complicated. Each asked me to complete a coding project, each one designed in paint-by-numbers fashion by a university keen to make it as frictionless as possible to complete its degrees. For three years, I thought of this tiny list of courses every day, told myself every day that I would work on them that day, that I would finish things and move on. For three years, I answered weekly calls from my academic mentor, reassuring her that I was making progress and that everything was fine. And for three years, I could bring myself to do nothing but the bare minimum to complete my degree, at the last possible second.

I felt a profound embarrassment with every year that passed with no degree. Learning has always come naturally to me, even as I have writhed with frustration against the confines of the education system as it stands. I earned my first Associate’s degree at 16, shortly before I graduated high school. I was supposed to sail through undergrad, and I knew I was capable of it. But there I was, deep into my twenties, with two more Associate’s degrees and a pile of other life experiences but no more than a bitter aborted degree at the flagship Mormon university BYU to show for it. Other life experiences piled up, but I felt on a fundamental level that I would have failed profoundly if I could not do something so basic as complete a degree. After all, one way or another I had been enrolled in an undergraduate institution for half my life by the end of it all.

I set out to finish my degree in a year and, strictly speaking, I succeeded at that task. It’s just that the year in which I finished it was surrounded by three years of quiet desperation, every second knowing I had something I should be doing, every second finding any pretext not to do it.

There was one mindset, and one mindset only, that propelled me through any given project: sheer, abject terror as I teetered on the precipice of true consequences. My university had six-month semesters, but for my purposes they may as well have been two weeks: five months would fade into emptiness and the sixth would begin to slip away, too, only for me to sit bolt upright, plead for my friends to hold me to account, and tear through all the work I needed to pass any given course. One semester, even this was not enough, since I knew on some level I would stay enrolled despite missing a full semester. The next, beside myself with desperation, I powered through a full final project while on the brink of dis-enrollment, leaving myself only a day or two as cushion, not even enough time to resubmit the project should any errors appear. My final push, tearing through my capstone project, came only as I felt my law school aspirations looming over my shoulder, knowing that I could either finish the project and my degree or forfeit my seat and my generous scholarship.

I could make excuses here, and some of you would be inclined to accept them: I was working full-time as a language analyst for the Air Force. I was dating, courting, and eventually marrying the man I love. Eventually, I was producing a podcast. It’s not like I was doing nothing—right?

Do not accept those excuses. Picture instead the same scene, repeated day after day stretching into eternity: I reflect, at work and in the quiet moments of the night, on the degree I said I would finish, and promise myself that I will work on it. I tell the people I love that I am working on it, that I will work on it. I turn my computer on.

I do not work on it.

The trouble with having a Duty you cannot bring yourself to fulfill, one with flexible hours and flexible oversight, is that it leeches into every moment of your life, casting a quiet pall over the whole of it. I should do something productive, you think—but sitting right on top of the “something productive” list, absent urgent tasks with pressing deadlines, is That. There are no weekends, no evenings, no moments of contentment in knowing you have done all you need to do.

You spend much of your time, instead, in what Tim Urban famously termed the Dark Playground. The greatest minds of our generation have been working tirelessly for decades now to weave pleasure palaces perfectly attuned to our impulses, fine-tuning ever better ways to seize our attention and capture our minds. Productivity can come in a moment, but first—let’s scroll Twitter, let’s play Hearthstone, let’s watch Netflix, let’s feel that soothing sense of engagement for just one more minute.

Bryan Caplan treats this sort of thing as revealed preference: I may have thought I wanted to finish my degree, but in reality I wanted to wander the dark playground. When I spend a whole day mindlessly playing round after round of blitz chess, that is an honest reflection of my desires. And—y’know, perhaps he’s right in that.

But if he is, why does my environment shift my capacity and my desire so much?

Environments of Rigor

My procrastination is neither new nor unpredictable. It has chased me throughout my life, following me through high school, university study, and into the workforce, weaving its way into my duties and personal projects alike. It was visible even as I wrote this essay, written not the moment I graduated but on the flight home from my commencement ceremony, a month after I meant to write it. It is visible now as I edit it, four months beyond even that, a few weeks before my first taste of law school finals.

It has not, however, followed me everywhere.

I was, after all, a diligent, focused, and capable Mormon missionary, spending two years keeping a strict schedule and following a voluminous list of rules with exactness. Wake at 6:30 every morning, exercise, study for two hours, find and teach potential converts until 9pm, plan for the next day, bed at 10:30. No movies, no TV, no internet except to write home weekly, no music except church music, no books except church books, so on and so forth. The harder-working my mission companion was, the happier I was, and the more I in turn stepped my own game up. Even as I struggled to come to terms with the dawning realization that Mormonism was founded in falsehood, I kept up my schedule and completed my committed duties as fully as I could.

I did, after all, sail through military basic training and technical school, earning high distinctions at every stage of the training process. When I was told to wake up at a certain time, or work out in a certain way, or complete tedious and pointless trainings in a given time-frame, I did so with only the level of griping that is the long-standing tradition—even duty—of enlisted military.

I did, after all, work two serious jobs concurrently, fulfilling my duties as a Podcaster’s Apprentice in full even as I was deployed to Japan on a rigorous flight schedule.

In each of those environments, I was someone completely different, someone both committed to and capable of doing the things I ought to do at the times and in the ways I was supposed to do them. When there is something I need to do, in an environment with rigor and oversight, I do it, and I do it well. I have sought out those environments throughout my childhood and adulthood alike, and inasmuch as I have accessed them, I have taken to them naturally and worked comfortably within them.

This essay is full of admissions against my own interest, so I hope you forgive those few admissions in my interest. Understand this: I am a man at war with my own mind, trapped in what feels in my cynical moments like a world and a culture that seems determined to validate my lower impulses and discourage my best. Environments with restrictions and rigor and strict oversight have fallen out of fashion, replaced by calls to be yourself, dismiss the “Protestant work ethic”, practice self-care.

Adults, people say, ought to be trusted to fulfill their responsibilities without people breathing over their shoulders. That’s all very well and good, but I live in the world that is, not the one that ought to be, and in that world I can spend three years dodging basic assignments while the misery of dodging them consumes my mind, or I can look for worlds with deadlines and rigor and oversight and competition and people who hold me accountable, and as a consequence become happily and eagerly productive.

A Path Forward

I know all along why I delay, deep on the quiet parts of my mind. Procrastinators always do. I know that every project feels like busy work in a college designed to churn out technically degrees in paint by numbers fashion. I know that I don’t actually want to program anymore, if I ever really did, and that I only want the degree to check a box that says yes, you are a competent citizen worthy of participation in Educated Adult Society. I know that in my heart of hearts, I feel like I should be above the whole thing.

But I also know words that pierce to my heart, though the coworker who said them couldn’t have known they’d apply so well here: How can you be above something you suck at?

How indeed? And I know I suck at it, because I know I don’t care enough and don’t work enough and am not enough for it. But I started it, and winners, I am told, never quit—nor, indeed, quitters ever win. So I must perform at something I feel at one above and beneath, something trivial yet impossible, something that looms over my soul and taunts me every day.

I wrote those words in an as-yet unfinished and unreleased essay—the sort of essay you write as you’re lying awake at 2am, yet more personal and more exposing than this one—back when I was staring at three stubborn remaining courses, hoping desperately that I would finish them.

Speedrunning college was my attempt at bootstrapping that sense of rigor and purpose that accompanies me at my best, conjuring via public accountability and a flashy goal the structure I felt I would need to succeed. The timeline was based on an honest assessment of the course material on offer and my own capability; others who completed the same in my wake, and the first three-quarters of my progression, confirmed that it was not unrealistic.

To those unfortunate enough to relate to this essay, I am afraid I can report no productivity hacks that make a lasting difference. Public accountability in the form of someone literally staring over my shoulder as I worked got me through some of the final projects, but I often outwitted myself and avoided letting someone stare over my shoulder when I refused to work. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the friends who co-worked with me, answered questions or helped with debugging, or simply tolerated my repeated tense outbursts each time a serious deadline loomed. So much of motivation is social.

I can say to my fellow procrastinators that I am skeptical of mindset-driven approaches and strongly in favor of environmental ones. If you want to complete something, put yourself in a social environment where not doing so is much harder than doing so. Fake consequences don’t work—your mind will scent weakness and ignore your artificial deadlines. But it is perfectly possible to create and occupy environments that encourage seriousness and rigor.

To educators, employers, and all others keen on understanding or combating the problems in play here, my advice is similar. I don’t care whether conscientiousness, executive function, and work ethics are mutable in practice: act as if they are not. Tight deadlines, supervision, and other tools of rigor need not be seen as failure states. Some people genuinely have no interest in doing what they ought, but there are many more like me who act dramatically differently in different environments, and who are grateful when environments align their short-term actions with their long-term goals.

We have collectively spent enormous time and effort stripping environments of their restraints. Something has been lost in that process—not, perhaps, for the high-agency, conscientious people who thrive no matter what their external environment looks like, but certainly for the rest of us.

Conclusion

As for myself? My pride is wounded, certainly. I lack the flashiness and signaling value of a structured, planned, deliberate year-long route through a degree. I paid much more than I needed, and spent years agonizing over something I could have done much sooner, obstructing and delaying many other passion projects.

But in the end, when things reached critical junctures, when failure to perform really would have thrown my long-term goals into disarray, when I really needed to progress, I did what I needed to do. Even as I quietly stepped away from my plans to document every step of the degree journey as it became a humiliation rather than a triumph, I did enough.

I have a Bachelor’s degree. I finished what I started, thirteen years after enrolling in my first university as an ambitious young high schooler. I walked on stage next to all sorts of others who have taken their own winding paths through life, pushing through something that really was a barrier even though I never felt it should have been, grabbing a diploma I never thought would feel like an accomplishment to grab.

I did not, in the end, speedrun college. But here I am.

Thanks to Impassionata for providing editing advice on this article.