when you’re in school, everything you do is a reflection of yourself. your efforts, your hard work, your determination. or lack thereof…
if you work hard, put in the hours, give it everything you got, or at least try try try…it will be reflected in your grades. evaluated. recognized. everyone says it doesn’t mean anything, and they’re probably right, you know. meaningless paper, numbers, figures. but at the very least it might have some equivalency with work you’ve actually done. whether it be studying your brains out, or cheating your ass off…there’s a balance there, you see?
this is not so in the real world. when you’re at a right proper job. put in your hours, give an extra effort, bend over backwards…you could do all of that, even more than when you were younger, and it still might not count for shit.
i’d be generous and say there’s a 50-50 chance that you could either benefit from your efforts or not. but that’s a bit of a large estimate. you could, in most cases, get completely ignored. that’s about the middle ground, i’d wager, and where most people fall whether they like it or not. a blip on the bleedin’ radar. and on the far worse end, you could get screwed over: walked on, pushed around, taken for granted, used. again and again and again until you’re all used up. until you’re a bitter husk of what you used to be, stripped of all ambitions and initiative…whittled down to the brittle core of something you didn’t even know you had inside you. resentment, hopelessness, apathy and a fine layer of despair. another dollar, another day…
if you’re lucky, and i mean really fucking lucky and manage to put forth all your effort and hard work (and not be a manky little asskiss); if you can do it day in and day out all day every day every damn day without losing that last flickering spark of…something…anything…well, at best you’ll get a pat on the back. or maybe a jolly ‘job well done, then!’ maybe. and you better thank your lucky stars for just that much because most of the poor workin’ stiffs out there get fuck all. so if that’s all you get, take it, man. fuckin’ take it.
and like it.
because that’s all there is.
unless you’re well versed in thievery, nepotism or blackmail. you know, because…it pays to have marketable skills.
* note: i apologize in advance for the S*P reference, seeing as how billy corgan has devolved into a massively huge wanker. but if you think about it, he always was a massively huge wanker, he just hid it better, yeah? right.
