I recently turned 30, which is an age that I never thought of myself as being. By that I mean that all my life I've never really planned or thought ahead at all, I'm just interested in the here and now. The biggest surprise of my life in that regard was finishing university. I had, like most of my peers, "mapped" my life from school to uni and then ... well in my case nothing, I had thought that I'd be an acedemic. Of course once I actually got to the end of my honours year I was thoroughly sick of what I had been studying and hacking for 16 hours a day instead. While it was obvious that IT was what I should be doing it was a big wake up call in the sense that for the first time I had to think about something after university, a first. Turning 30 was a similar experience. The age itself doesn't worry me, afterall I've been steadily working towards various things, using my time learning and exploring concepts and ideas and all in all I feel stronger, faster, smarter and more knowledgeable then when I was, say 21. That said 30 was simply an age that I had never thought of in connection with myself. So I decided to take stock of what I was doing with my life and where I wanted to go, so instead of my usual birthday, which for those of you that don't know me is spent wandering around old haunts reminiscing, I went to hampstead heath and thought about the future. For the record I can highly recommend going to Hampstead heath for a walk and a think, it has a great view (something that I think is important for thinking) and it is one of the few places that you can get a bit of space in London. In fact I liked it so much I'm now seriously thinking about moving there shortly.
I spent about 5 hours just walking around thinking, after a particularly good thought I'd sit down for half an hour and write it all down. I approached it from the perspective of what I liked about my life and what I didn't like and what steps I'd need to do to fix the things I didn't like. A lot of what I came up with is a little too personal to put down in a public blog like this but I promised various people I would write up some kind of synthesis so here are the relevant points:
- In order to do accomplish anything then I must be passionate about it. I should focus on doing things that I enjoy while avoiding things that I hate, common sense but easy to get distracted from. The following serves as those lists, though not exhaustive:
ENJOY
- learning - mastering something - tinkering with computers
- rigorous examination
- perfecting something
- competition
- adventure
- neophilia
- space ( both personal and mental)
- concrete objectives
- nice objects
HATE
- slow thinkers
- repetition
- conformity
- bad physical shape
- lack of accomplishment
- time where nothing is learnt
Finding motivation will come not from just one thing that I enjoy, but should rather come from a combination of things that I enjoy. Long term motivation means more discipline then I am currently enforcing on myself, while doing something that you love is easy, you don't always love it and shying away from something the moment I come across a part of it that I don't love is very counter productive. I should structure my life so that I can achieve goals (see accomplishments). I should also regularly think about what I'm doing and where I'm going and spend time considering possibilities.
Some thoughts on what matches some of the above are things like learning to code well which matches many of the intellectual side of things and doing regular physical activities matches the others. This suggests that it would be very beneficial for me to learn to code and schedule some regular "adventure" type physical activities. Mountaineering, canyoning, skiing and walking all seem appropriate.
- Accomplishments can sometimes be smaller things that require little amount of work or perhaps just a moment of inspiration, but more commonly they require serious amounts of work and dedication. I'm not very good at the later and so
I should get in the habit of formulating lists and actively ensure that I am working towards the goals on the list. As part of this there needs to be some form of measurement, a regular litmus test to ensure that I have forward progress, this also helps the feeling of underachievement that often comes after working on something for a long period of time but without finishing it,
even when in many cases you are making big progress (ie learning a language isa very good example of this). I need to accept myself as an accomplishment andnot require any external validation of that. I need to appreciate that without
motivation it is highly unlikely that I will have any accomplishments.
So there you have it, motivation and accomplishments were the key for that train of thought. What that all equates to a list of things that I've given myself to work on and regularly check that I'm actually achieving. Again the list is personal but includes things like ensuring that I'm actually going out and socialising as well as getting back in shape.
Actually I'll end it there and make new blog entries for the different topics ;)
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