👋 Hey,
So... recently I have been really thinking about how I can get out of this box/bubble I have been in for the past while (what seems like my whole life??).
I'm undecided.
I don't know why, but I can never seem to pick a single thing to completely focus my attention on. Being my age, I watch all of the smart people that I know who are focusing, learning, grinding, getting into universities, and getting the internships that I feel I could never possibly reach. But here I am. Undecided.
As always....
One thing I cannot stop myself from doing, no matter how hard I try, is learning randomly. Always looking at something... Reading some random article, a YouTube video that doesn't relate to the task that I should be doing, A book that gets the first half (more likely less than a quarter) finished before the next becomes too interesting to pass up...
I always want to do the interesting thing.
From now on, my plan is simple: do the boring stuff that produces the largest percentage of the results.
It's unfortunate, but that new fancy plugin isn't going to make my shitty music sound any better, that brand new JavaScript framework isn't going to give me ideas for what I want to build, and that fancy new AI isn't going to do anything for me if I don't know what I want to do.
What a waste.
It seems that the bulk of my time is spent on the 20% of outcomes. If you're not familiar with this theory, the Pareto principle (also known as the 80:20 rule) states that roughly 80% of outcomes result from 20% of causes. Inversely, focusing on the 80% of causes that result in 20% of the outcomes... Is not great. So that begs the question:
"How can I master the first step?"
This is really mainly a question of how to start learning correctly. If I want to write a book, I probably shouldn't first be thinking about how to fit what I want to say in 300 pages; that's too big of a goal to start with. I need to see how I can master getting words down efficiently, coherently, and especially all with my own voice (which is kinda what I'm doing right now 🤭). I need to prove to myself that the start is not hard; it's just kinda basic, which is good. The fundamentals don't have to be the most exciting thing ever; it's what follows that becomes extraordinary.
Pen to paper, click and clack.
So far, I still haven't answered my original question of what I should do when I'm undecided, and I'm still not sure. Someday soon I'll figure something out that will work, but for now, I think that I'm the type of person who will keep chasing the things that excite me til' the end. That doesn't mean that I shouldn't spend the time to learn how to learn, however, so let's keep going.
Look in the right places.
What I've been doing so far in my learning journey is looking at and around the result, not the beginning of the slope. Let's say that I wanted to learn how to do content creation, for example. If I look at some creators' videos now, I would definitely learn how they currently attract their audience under their current circumstances, but I'm not in those circumstances. I need to review the first 50, 100, 200 hours that they worked on, learn from their original mistakes, which are most likely going to be the same ones that I make. For other disciplines, this might be more obvious: if I wanted to design a circuit board, for instance, I wouldn't go and try to make or learn from a massively complex design from a PhD student or huge tech company; I would look at a simple glowing LED circuit board tutorial. Alright, that was really simple and goes without saying, really, but next, I need to learn how to go...
FAST FAST FAST FAST
A major part that I need to practice with learning is the speed that I can go. Because I try to do so much with my time, I need to work on my iteration process. Going back to that YouTube example, if I want to gain the most feedback constantly, it would be to iterate really fast. Even if most doesnt get posted, getting as much feedback as quickly as possible accelerates the speed at which I improve exponentially.
Keep at it, bud.
I need to not give up on stuff as easily. Again, it's suuuch a simple concept that it might sound completely unnecessary, but it's something that I need to nail into my brain. The longer I can survive pushing through failure, the more likely I am to succeed.
Undecided.
Once again, I'm still not sure where I'll end up, but I really do hope that learning how to learn will aid me in doing whatever I want in life. Nonetheless, pushing myself to actually follow through with the ideas I have in my head really benefits me, it seems like, and I truly hope that it keeps working like this in the future.
Thank you so much for reading this, with ❤️ - Alex.