MOVEME
I’m no longer thriving on change. I resist suggestions. I don’t have enthusiasm for things I once did. When I started where I’m at now, I wanted to learn everything I could. Conversely, I expected people around me to want to learn everything they could from me. But I was met with resistance. And I just didn’t get it. Nobody pursued technical hobbies, read books, or wanted to talk philosophy. So I shut down. I lost my drive, energy, and passion.
Time to find them again.
I started by cutting the fat and refocusing my purpose.
All last year I was doing way too many things at the same time. At year’s end, I was playing 3 games (DS3, Clicker Heroes, Tactics Ogre); developing 2 games (Resource Quest, Outsider); learning a new software language and framework (JavaScript and React); believing I should be preparing myself for a game dev career by working on learning the Unity engine and making a ‘real’ game; spending time being anxious about not making enough money or losing my current perks (closeness, flexibility, influence, latitude, manageable pace of work) if I switch to a game dev career; thinking about several blog post ideas; reading at least 6 books simultaneously (Mistborn book 2, Unix handbook, JavaScript: the good parts, Oathbringer, Lovecraft collection, Effective Python) so that whenever I had time to read I had to CHOOSE a book to progress, wasting precious decision-making power and inducing distracting thoughts about the ones I didn’t choose; neglecting entering my reading notes into my data store; working on at least 3 major tasks at work; learning and regularly practicing two instruments; watching black mirror season 4. That’s at least 20 different threads, the only ones of which had a clear end point being Black Mirror, the books, and playing video games (except Clicker Heroes, that one never ends). And all of those are the lowest resistance, the things I’m generally pretty eager to do, which, unless I’m disciplined, either interferes with my thinking when on an important task, or cause me to abandon those tasks altogether for immediate satisfaction.
I would be reluctant to read the programming/technical/non-fiction books because reading them demands clarity of thought, without which that time is wasted. The primary time I have clarity of thought is right after my morning coffee, and right after lunch, both typically used up by work duties. Morning coffee > slowly degrades > lunch > uptick again, but not as high as morning coffee > degrades rapidly. The rapidity of decay is a function of how much sleep I got the night before and possibly how hydrated I am. This induced the guilt mentioned above (Why am I reading something for entertainment when I could be learning?)
All of these tasks competed with my health (gym and healthy cooking taking up time and causing annoyance/anxiety), sleep (mind racing, no closure), family life (moody and distracted), work life (avoiding new responsibility, minimal effort on open tasks). Performing any of these tasks or hobbies made me anxious that I wasn’t performing the other 19 tasks or hobbies.
Work is a weird one. It’s too easy to take advantage of people’s natural inclination to not notice what others are doing so long as the surface area they have to interact with seems normal and reasonably frictionless. In larger organizations this is exascerbated since you may not even interact with the majority of people in the company if you are a doer rather than a leader. It’s harder to fake if you’re in a smaller organization, and even more so if you’re a leader. Everyone is pretty much aware of everyone else in those situations (or at least of you if you’re a leader in a larger organization). With smaller organizations, people know when you show up, when you leave, when you eat lunch, how often you go to restroom. Maybe not specifically, but events observed frequently enough over a period of time will generally illicit some memory or impression about how an individual behaves. All of these things make me feel like a horrible person when I let them happen.
So I’m giving most of the above the axe, and making changes to how I approach everything.
The biggest one I’m letting go of (for now) is the idea that everything I do should further my game development career. This automatically precludes–and causes guilt/anxiety when I engage in–all family life and domestic activities, most work activities (basically halting my growth in all areas; also too tempting to work on my game code when I should be working on my work code since they look the same to an observer, generally), most non-fiction reading material. It allows me to justify things like playing games (source material), reading fiction (also source material), and working on game development when I should be working (development is development, right?). All of these things cause me anxiety because I feel like I’m letting everyone down.
Aside from the focus aspect, there are too many reasons to not switch careers right now, three of them being the most important people in the world, whom I have been neglecting with all of my hyper-productivity goals. It’s a vicious cycle when you feel the reason you can’t make a move is something you can’t do anything about without making it worse for everyone involved. Then you get bitter and you snap at them and create unnecessary tension and anxiety, which leads to resistance, which makes everything more frustrating and take longer, which spawns all sorts of unproductive, impossible, even shameful threads in your mind so that when you FINALLY get a chance to do the thing that not being able to do was causing you anxiety, all you can think about is how much of a colossal ass you’ve been, and you get nothing done.
I’m also aligning my reading with my work, and reducing the number of in-progress books to a single book, which is my primary focus with my free time (if I have either focus or free time), and attempting to stick to the goal of reading one book a week. If I finish the book early, I get to work on something else. Right now I’m about two days ahead (I have about 35 pages left on my second book of the year, which I need to finish by Monday to stay on track), so I’m taking the time to flesh out my thoughts. With reading as my primary goal, and putting the game dev career on the back burner, I’m able to really FOCUS on what I’m reading, retain more, and get through it faster. These decisions let me turn off the voice in my head. I also recently went through an experience that forced me to stretch my reading endurance, and I found out that not only can I maintain focus, I can be pretty damn happy doing it (and also, wine helps). At the end of December, Oathbringer was due back at the library, and I had 4 days to finish it. The wait list would likely be months, since it was newer (and the waiting line was about four times what it was the first time I reserved it). I decided I could finish it in time. And I did. I read 250 pages a day for three days in a row. And I was the happiest I had ever been, both during and after. I even found a few isms to put in my better-isms app.
So here we go. My primary goal is read one book a week, selected from a book list of my (randomly chosen) mentor who’s never met me, but left on Quora a pretty good list of 52 books you should read related to business, life, politics, people, that will make you a better person by expanding your worldview. If I finish early for the week, I can write, play a game, develop a game, or watch something on Netflix. Otherwise, too bad. I’m also committing to avoiding work from home situations as much as possible, and to being in the office during core hours. When I’m at the office, I’m there to work on my company’s goals and tasks, not my personal goals and tasks. I’m also committing to looking for ways in which I can contribute to business processes and problems at work to improve the lives of those around me.