The Dean's List

I thought that I would never see
A Dean's List that included me.
And if I keep writing like that, I never will again. When the letter arrived yesterday, followed closely by an email of the entire list, I was utterly and completely happy. It is so nice to set a goal and then reach it. It makes some (but perhaps not all) of the evenings spent studying seem worth it. And it certainly justifies the support of my friends who urged me to do the best I could, and kept telling me I could do it.
It's not a diploma, and it's not an advanced degree, but it certainly is nice.
What have I learned from this? Set a goal, figure out the intermediate steps, attack the goal one step at a time -- but not obsessively. In other words, keep the Netflix subscription and don't leave the phone turned off all the time. Go to the mall, even. But then, come back home, pick up the books (and wow, are there a lot of them this semester . . .) and get back to work.
More later. I have to go find a time management tool, a study guide for Chinese geography, and the introductory materials on the 18th century novel.