Consider this my New Year’s resolution.
I feel this existential dread sometimes. I want my life to amount to something, but it’s hard to see this happen the way things are going right now.
Basically, I’ve a got a pretty long list of things I’d really like to do and skills I’d like to learn. Accomplishing all this requires quite a lot of time, energy (both physical and mental). Sadly, as it is right now, I don’t really have any of that.
Getting such things done should be easy if you really enjoy the process, and I can assure you that I do. The problem is that being lazy and procrastinating playing video games or watching videos on the internet have always been way more appealing to me than any “productive” work.
I admit, this gave me a lot of fun over the years, but it’s also giving me some regrets: I’ve not achieved much, definitely not as much as I could have. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some success in life but that feeling of unrealized potential is just too much to handle sometimes.
And it’s not just about my ego, although it certainly does play a huge role. There are simply so many things that, if existed, could drastically improve my life, making it more comfortable and enjoyable. I can always hope someone else comes up with something similar, but experience shows that the chances of that actually happening are pretty slim.
So it’s not that I’m not motivated, just not disciplined, and that’s what I’d like to try to change.
Here’s the list of things I’d like to work on in the nearest future, in no particular order:
German: I’d been learning German for about 4-5 years in university, but haven’t touched it for some years. I never became any proficient, but it was enough to watch some yotube videos. It’d be a shame to lose that, and there are still some texts that I hope to read at some point.
The plan so far is to just consume anything in German. Right now I’ve got “Die Nacht von Lissabon” by Erich Maria Remarque in paper, thanks to my beautiful girlfriend. Probably not the easiest text to reanimate my German, but we’ll see.
Electronics: I’ve always been interested in electronics, but never really knew how to approach this subject. I tried reading books and assembling some circuits, but that never led anywhere because I didn’t have any clear goals and these circuits were too simple, which made them meaningless.
Luckily I discovered “Make: Electronics” by Charles Platt. This book, along with the some accompanying component kits, appears to be an interesting introduction to the field of electronics. I went through the first third of the book last year, and felt that I had learned quite a lot. Hopefully, once I finish the book, I’ll be able to start experimenting on my own. I’ve got some ideas for little gadgets which should be fun to make.
Mathematics: Essential for deep understanding of many things. Right now I’m basically planning to go over the mathematics I “learned” in university but quickly forgot to due some general lack of both emotional involvement and practical need.
Vulkan: This graphics API appears to be the graphics API for the foreseeable future. It’d be nice to get into graphics programming, so this is pretty important. Luckily there are many resources online.
Blog: I’d like to write more. Programming, video games, whatever. I just need practice phrasing my thoughts and analyzing things.
Blender: 3D modeling sounds pretty fun and I’d like to be able to make low-poly models for games and whatnot.
Reading books: There’s an insane amount of information and a lot of cool stories and thoughts I still need to experience. This includes both fiction and nonfiction.
“Watch later” playlist: I’ve got about a thousand videos in there. Most of those are recording from various programming-related conferences.
Programming project of varying complexity: Pretty self-explanatory. I’ll tell you all about it later, don’t worry.
The main idea is to start actually forcing myself to dedicate time to these things. Ideally, I should be able to find abount an hour every day. This is quite optimistic on my part, but in any case, anything is better than nothing, right?
I’m not going to commit to any schedule, just assign each of these “tasks” one of the days of the week. If I find myself not wanting to do anything or being unsure what to do exactly, I’ll just look at the calendar and do the “task of the day”, breaking ties with a randomizer or something. I’ve not ironed out the details yet.
And to give myself some more motivation, I’m going to post a report every week. I might create a separate section on the website with its own feed so you won’t have to see it if you don’t care, but we’ll see. Regardless, see you next week!