Your best, as well as not doing it, are obviously subjective, as it might seem to others like you are making karir to the highest degree your job when in fact you’re just doing it in the kebsest of manner, so there’s a level of trickiness there. Furthermore, being in the business/job/field that involves saving lives and such, not doing your best might seem dangerous because it might seem to others that you don’t care whether your patients die. We are all adults so we probably understand that I don’t mean letting your patients die, in fact I don’t think anybody cares enough to nitpick that statement anyway, but just to elucidate, I had told Smoketh that what I really mean is that to keep on maintaining one’s cool in the hurly burly of things, the way to go is to just do the minimum requirement. Doing extra work is like, to quote that old quote, getting a huge rock and making it pukol on your own ulo. We vomit at extracurricular activities! We puke at volunteering for administrative work for self-fulfillment! We just snicker at the thought of doing extra research not required for graduation! We sneer at people making kandarapa for extra work that requires extra effort and steals extra time away from reading comic books and sleeping! Actually we don’t sneer at those people, we love them and we cherish them without judgment, because they maintain the status quo and we avoid getting noticed.

In one of our masters class yesterday we answered a questionnaire that assessed our learning motivation. I was classified as goal-oriented, as opposed to being group-oriented or learning-oriented. The description of being goal-oriented in the questionnaire is very sophisticated and a little bit psychoanalytic, but what it really boils down to is that one who is goal-oriented has this mantra in his head while performing a required task: para tapos na. Gawin na lang para tapos na, isulat na ang paper para tapos na, isubmit na ang dapat isubmit para tapos na at maka-graduate na at makapag-practice na at tumanda na at mag-retire na.

Minimum requirement rules.