Prioritizing

Most things you get started on will tell you that you suck at them. My first 3D render was horrible, I stumbled around the pitch the first time I played football and my first academic paper got rejected 5 times in a row. Eventually, after trial and error you reach an a-ha moment when everything sort of just "clicks", and that feeling? that feeling is euphoric. It's what makes the idea of starting something new addicting - the dopamine rush of putting magic on a screen just out of pure willpower and dedicated effort. 

The problem is, it's very easy to get caught in a cycle of trying new things and not know where the road is taking you. I've constantly got 20 new project ideas before the previous ones have even taken off. For every idea there's some YouTube tutorial that's made the whole daunting process of getting started easy for you. You no longer have to spend months saving money to pay for that software you always wanted to try out - it's got a free trial version, and better yet - some kind soul has put it out on piratebay, cracked and ready for you to mess around with for free. It's like a disease and in a sense its a way of procrastinating on really honing in on the effort you need to put in to become a top notch expert at something. Lately I've started so many new endeavors that I've lost track of where I'm going - and I'm using this blog post as a means of finding out what I need to cut out of my life. 

So, as an exercise I wrote down all the things I want to learn, things I need to do and things I am interested in, into a list, writing my thoughts on whether they were essential or required more effort. Then I sorted them into categories. After all that was done I decided which ones were essential and which ones I could cut out.

Feel free to skip past this stuff because it's just for me and may not be something you can relate with.