I have so many things I wanna do, always wanted to do. Some of it I got done! Like becoming an engineer, creating a decent career for myself, riding a motorcycle. Take a step back and look at my life and it's pretty much golden, I could coast for the remainder of it and live better than 99% of humankind throughout the ages.
But it's not enough of course, cause I'm human and it never is. I want to start a business. I want to read every philosophy book ever. I want to solve consciousness. I want to be fluent in chinese, japanese, french, spanish, know enough vietnamese to fuck with people when I'm there. I want to be a god tier engineer, one of those strings-together-unix-tools-on-a-whim types that turns around and shits out an android app after, I want to be able to do high level math, I want to understand and contribute to physics, I want to invent AI, I want to be good at chess, I want to be a decent music producer.
Jesus, look at that list. That's probably 25% of the things I really truly want for myself. Unrealistic? Probably. But am I living up to my potential right now? No. Absolutely not. If there's anything I've learned there's always another level. Our ability to make the previously uncomfortable and impossible, comfortable, has so far to me seemed limitless.
But how do I do those things? Making trello boards and tracking progress like my life is an agile project? Looking in the mirror and doing affirmations? Meditating? Yearly goal setting? For me the biggest obstacle is the day to day. Time slips away just like dude says in the article. Looking at memes, trolling Nazis on Twitter with said memes, dicking around on news.ycombinator and justifying it by saying to myself that sometimes I learn some cool stuff here.
Is it always going to be a battle against the distractions? Always little tricks like uninstalling the Twitter app, logging out of it in my browser? Having a habit tracking app? Is reaching my potential going to take a series of millions of bandaids? That seems wrong but I don't know what else to do.