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+---
+title: "I'm doing too many things"
+date: 2023-12-24
+feature_image: "/sm_blog/assets/images/too-many-things-images/feature-image.jpg"
+categories: Projects Life-lessons Habits Motivation
+---
+
+In the last few years, I've been carrying out so many activities.
+
+Here are the most important ones:
+
+1. Studying
+2. Web development
+3. Video games development
+4. Android app development
+5. 3D modeling & Art
+6. Video editing
+7. Music production
+8. Writing essays and tutorials
+
+It surely is a lot. Right now, I could be defined as a student, a programmer, an artist, a musician, and a writer all at the same time.
+
+But if this sounds impossible, that's because it is.
+
+While I'm glad to frequently have the desire to put myself to work and make or do something relevant (a rare phenomenon for many people), I still have a problem distributing this energy properly.
+
+When you try to do something by only exploiting the bursts of willpower and determination instead of forming a habit, you'll almost always come back empty-handed from what you were trying to achieve.
+
+I can put all of myself into what I'm interested in, but most of the time, I quickly end up exhausted or distracted by something else.
+
+The reality is that time is finite, and motivation is even more so. Oftentimes, the more time passes, the less motivation you have.
+
+This is especially evident when I work on a lot of separate projects in parallel. It is advantageous to avoid monotony, but it also makes it easier to lose interest, discipline, and momentum, at least in my case. For example, when I switch from one to the other I have to readapt to the workflow every time and that's not very efficient.
+
+Maybe the problem is my excessively broad range of interests. I'm constantly reminded that in order to focus you must inevitably say "No" to most other things.
+
+> "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things." -- Steve Jobs
+
+The problem I have with this approach is that I simply cannot refuse to explore all those things. Why? It's hard to explain, but I try my best:
+
+1. Limiting myself to only a few choices would become monotonous and frustrating, and I would probably become very stressed if I did that thing for too long;
+2. I'm afraid that being very good at doing only one specific activity would make me vulnerable if that thing is no longer needed in the world, either because it's been automated or for other reasons;
+3. In general, I'm a very curious person, therefore I can't give up on everything I'm doing, even if I'm aware that it's impossible to complete all my projects.
+
+You'd rightly argue that's better to complete one project instead of starting 100 others and never finishing them. I agree.
+
+I also know that doing so many disparate things prevents you from being an expert at them all to the point where I would honestly acknowledge that I'm not very good at any of the activities I listed above. Maybe, in that case, it's better to be able to do just one thing but well.
+
+#### What else can I do to solve this?
+
+I'm young and I'm still exploring my capabilities and the possibilities I have ahead of me. I'm not ready at all to make a definitive choice.
+
+Not that I'm being asked to do that, but that's kind of what the society wants. It's what I should have to do if I wanted to become good at something and be successful.
+
+A potential solution would be to change the scope of my projects and lower my ambitions. Since I still have to learn a lot before being capable of managing more complex projects and activities, that would be a reasonable thing to do, but it wouldn't be 100% painless.
+
+I will describe the projects I'm talking about in the upcoming *end-of-the-year* post, but in short, there's a reason if I don't do simple and easy projects: they are trivial and unoriginal (especially for games, videos, and music). If I spend a lot of time on a project, it has to be a relevant one, or I rather do something else entirely. While [perfect is the enemy of good](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good), I'd avoid accepting bad outcomes just to excuse the effort spent to achieve them.
+
+I don't really know how to end this post, and I still haven't found a satisfying solution to my problem. I might update the post if I find it, but in the meantime, I hope sharing this feeling of mine could be helpful to other people too.
+
+<span class="caption">Post thumbnail generated by DALL·E 2 and edited with GIMP.</span>