So there has been something that I have recently been getting into the habit of doing. I will be super motivated to want to do something and within an hour, write down ideas, plan out what I will be doing and how I will be doing it. I will research as much as I can within that amount of time and really find all the determination I can to learn what I need to learn. This will include bookmarking a million websites I think will be useful, finding all the books on the topic, and looking up all the tutorials I can.
The problem that I face, which seems to be something a lot of people face, is that we create such a high benchmark for ourselves for this task we look to achieve, that we end up falling flat on our faces after no longer than a few weeks.
After beating myself up countless times on making projects for myself and not keeping to my promise, I wanted to find the reason that we are not keeping ourselves going. I am going to start with the learning.
One thing that I have noticed a trend in is that a lot of projects has some learning involved. Whether this be learning a new programming language for your particular task, a framework which is involved with your project, a customer base in which you want your project to target, there is always some new type of learning that is involved with this. Now, the question comes to why can’t we follow through with the learning to accomplish this task?
I find that we can’t learn these things because of the initial project we start off with. Some of us are so ambitious to create the next big thing or to do something of such large scale, that internally deters us away from ever reaching our goal. If you were looking to pick up something like running, you wouldn’t immediately goal yourself to olympic levels would you? Or if you are looking to pick up rock climbing, you wouldn’t goal yourself to the hardest climb you can find. I mean, sure that is a future goal that we often look to find, but it isn’t something that should immediately be driving us to learn what it is we need to learn.
We need to start with a very small project. Something that would be both satisfying and give you that feeling of accomplishment. Let us remember that we are in the state of “learning” still. This is the time we can take to enjoy the information we are receiving and having this small project will be the motivational factor that keeps us going. As a runner, seeking to run a target set in a certain amount of time. As a rock climber, finding a decent route that you cannot initially do but can goal towards. As a developer, taking a small prjoect or even a small subset of your ambitious project and using that to boost your learning.
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