I have a habit of quitting because something is hard — I learned this while I chatted with my news editor, Max, as we worked through city council coverage. 

It’s quite a funny conversation; he asked if I got any further in Elden Ring, and I told him I was “taking a break.” The way Elden Ring is set up is that it’s more of an open-world game; the player is given the freedom to roam the virtual space and follow their own questline. 

It’s also similar to the Dark Souls series: ​​you’re given minimal instruction from the game itself, you lose all your runes (the main currency in the game) if you die and there’s almost always a surprise when you’re fighting the bosses. My frustration was exacerbated as a result of the initial shock of an open-world concept combined with the difficulty of the enemies. 

The main reason why I’m taking a “break” from Elden Ring is because of these stupid trolls that seem to be everywhere in the starting area of the game. It’s just that my stats are super low, so even with the weapon I have, it’s extremely likely for the troll to kill my character in one hit. So I got frustrated and quit. 

But how does this connect to me as a person? Well, I’ve noticed that same feeling when it comes to school: I want to drop out. I want to drop out of school because I feel like I learn more from experience than from a classroom. That’s the whole reason why I joined the Daily — I didn’t have any prior journalistic experience, but I got to learn from people who did. 

And for me, continuing something that I don’t have an internal drive for is hard. It’s hard when I come into the office to work on mundane tasks like checking and responding to emails, editing stories or checking if the website is up-to-date. But today, I learned that I’m looking at these tasks in the wrong way. 

You see, I’m currently attending a conference in Minneapolis for student journalists, and one of the instructors posed a really interesting question: so what? And I realized I’m not answering that question on a day-to-day basis. 

So what if this task is boring; why does it need to be done? I need to ask myself, “How do I make this interesting?” or, “Why is this important?” It’s such a slight change to my way of thinking, but it creates a significant shift in how I approach those mundane tasks. It forces me to find an ambition to finish.

It’s a challenge I’m looking forward to this week; how can I change my thought process to find the significance of the task and then figure out what I need to do to finish it?