Finding Focus
Sticking to one thing for any meaningful amount of time is something I find difficult to do. I could be a victim of the age that we live in, who knows? But for as long as I can remember, shiny object syndrome has ruled me. Amongst other things, this has had a detrimental effect on my attempts to learn to code, and to build a business from my coding skills. The reason I know that coding is something I really want to do, is because I keep on returning back to it. Its always at the back of my mind. Our guru, Naval Ravikant, said that we should find what feels like play to us, but is work to others. Coding is that thing for me.
The tech space exacerbates my shiny object syndrome with its constant focus on the next best 'thing'. As a novice coder, I found myself paralysed with choice, I'd start projects, then eventually abandon them.
This yo-yo'ing cycle left me feeling really frustrated with myself. Recently, though, more of the people I follow on Twitter have been advocating for a simplification of the tools we use and to resist the urge to over-engineer.
I took this to heart. And it has led me down some interesting paths. I set up a DigitalOcean VPS and hosted a website that I built on there. It was fun, and I bolstered my understanding of web fundamentals in the process. But it also made me appreciate why people use serverless providers; they remove the need for all the setup, so you can just focus on deploying your stuff.
By internalising this 'keep it simple' mantra, I feel better equipped to resist the latest shiny thing and focus on developing my dev skills by building real world projects. Ideally stuff that scratches my own proverbial itch.
When I think about it, this makes complete sense: Keeping it simple imposes a constraint. And constraints gives you freedom. I've known this for a long time, but I've only just recently connected the dots.
As frustrating as this process has been, I feel like things are starting to finally pull into focus. I know what I need to do, I just have to keep the blinkers on.
This post (Finding Focus) was last edited 11 months, 1 week ago.