| Here's my tiny secret I use in my mind to try a lot of new things with the same amount of energy and enthusiasm (without feeling like I'm getting beat down)... I think of my life like a series of lit candles. I actually visualize it as such. Each candle represents a project, a way to make money. When a candle dies or the flame goes out, it means I got bored of that project, it didn't make money, it failed, whatever. The goal of my life is to have several lit candles at once, and not only that, but a better and better FALLBACK. A fallback in my terms is basically "if EVERYTHING else fails, you will have THAT thing as something that makes you happy/will carry you the rest of your life". It's basically something you have already achieved, or have, or ONE HUNDRED percent certain you can get it if you don't currently have it. The point of a fallback is that it lets you focus on something, giving it your 100%, without that nagging feeling like you're "wasting time" or FOMO. You can fully commit to it, and just enjoy it for what it is, without a fear of failure (because why should you care if it fails, you can always do X, your fallback) When I was 22, my fallback was "I can at least learn real estate, which isn't that fun, but I can make money and I can backpack around the world on a shoestring budget" insert more projects, more success, more freelancing... all driven by the limitless energy stemming from the fact that the 'worst case scenario' wasn't actually so bad. When I was 25, dozens more lit candles, dozens more burn out, my fallback was "at least I can do freelancing for $20/hr for the rest of my life and have true freedom to do whatever I want" When I was 28-29, my fallback was "at least I can make $230K+/year coding, working for someone else, but still making an awesome living and traveling" When I was 30, my fallback was "at least I can make companies in a weekend and just make money from all my side projects, and potentially try to hit a winner to retire, and if I don't hit it soon I can always go back to working" When I was 33, my fallback was "at least I have the relationships with my network that I aggressively spent time building to build at least one 50-100 million dollar business... at least I have about 20 very successful people wanting me to build stuff/start companies with me and any one of them could be a winner.. and if EVERY ONE ELSE FAILS I can always get a job and travel" That's where I'm at right now. Each fallback increases over time, just keep replacing candles with more candles and let others burn out. I probably have gone through 500 candles... some burn for years before they go out, others burn for a day. I have over 100 private repos on my GitHub of (fully-written) projects, 90% of them bombed. I've met an insane amount of awesome people in the process, and have learned a lot. The companies I built that are successful are now are doing well, including one in the alexa top 50. All of this came from a boy sitting in a room of my friend who graduated from harvard saying "you should learn programming" and me thinking "Im just an art student, I'm way too dumb for that" So programming / business / companies is one passion. For my other passions, guitar, drawing, painting, biking... those don't come EXTREMELY naturally to me, except drawing, but I have drawn since I was a kid and it just 'makes sense'. Just because I'm really good at it (fairly early on) however doesn't mean I don't struggle with the resistance to doing it every day. Sometimes I look at people who are obsessed on instagram and can just paint or draw for 10 hours a day... and wish I had that. I suppose in that sense coding is my most crazed obsession, I can program for 15 hours a day fairly effortlessly. But other hobbies I have to work for it. |