Or, I’m starting my goals.
Recently I have been working long hours. I’m actually working on projects that are somewhat interesting, but when so much work is going on, there is no time to appreciate the interesting bits of the projects. In addition, when you work so long you don’t have to go to the gym, or make a healthy meal, or even see my daughter for more than an hour or so while she is awake. Soon you quickly start losing motivation to do the job.
I find when the pressure of work starts to increase you start daydreaming about other things you could do. Things you could do If you had the flexibility of working when you wanted, or maybe if you could work for yourself. If you had the flexibility of more vacation maybe.
Dreams Vs Goals
A lot of people seem to have dreams, so when they talk about a life they would like to live the frame it as an unobtainable thing. When you work at your regular job for long hours at the same time you have a kid and family, you start thinking about your dreams. But the problem with dreams is that they are just dreams, until you do something about it. The best thing to do about it is to create some sort of actionable and measurable goal and work towards that.
Several weeks ago I laid out my goals for my 5 years. It includes creating a side hustle of some kind. My previous side hustle attempts have all failed by doing too much research, so this time I decided to write as much as I can and see what sticks.
Yesterday I started to list out my daily personal experiences. Not just for the purpose of a strange personal journal, but for the purpose of writing and creativity. I saw a Medium Article once about writing 200 articles in 200 days. And it mentioned you need to meld your everyday experiences with topics you know (or I suppose can learn) about.
I realized that I know a lot about many topics, which makes it hard to find any focus. What I usually do is research and research until one season turns into another season, and eventually nothing gets done. Or, because I spent so long on this thing to make it perfect, if something goes wrong I will no longer be motivated to do that thing. I need to move fast. Facebook, used to call it “Move fast and Break things”. I need to move fast and learn.
My wife was telling me about an experiment a teacher did that she read about. A Teacher told half the class that they would get an A if they took a certain number of pictures, it didn’t matter if they were good or not. The teacher told the other half their grade was based on one perfect picture. A classic quantity vs quality experiment. At the end of the semester, the half that had the quantity assignment actually produced better pictures than the ones with the quality assignment. They took so many pictures that they were able to learn to be better photographers. So, as they say, I need to put “pen to paper” and just start.