"It refers to a hypothetical situation wherein an ass (donkey) that is equally hungry and thirsty is placed precisely midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water. Since the paradox assumes the donkey will always go to whichever is closer, it dies of both hunger and thirst since it cannot make any rational decision between the hay and water."
If you have many interests it is easy to not make any appreciable advancement in any of them. Rate your interests. Pick maybe 2 and work those until you are content with them or find out you dont really like them.
You flail around for a bit and die of old age.
Doing something generally takes much longer to accomplish than knowing about something, so focus your intentionality on what you choose to do. You can and will still learn organically about the stuff you want to know about.
(2) Remember that the core idea behind Kanban is to limit the amount of work in progress.
The more work in progress streams, the more time you waste context switching. Being intentional about the things you choose to do and the order in which you do them allows you to do more things in the same amount of time than if you tried to do all of them simultaneously.
Again, this applies to the things you do, not the things you learn about organically.
(3) When trying to do something, stay intentional about what your goal is - it's generally easy to decide what to do next, and it's generally hard to decide when to halt what you're doing now in order to move onto the next thing.
When I asked myself this question, I had to face the uncomfortable reality that I can not follow them all. I started trimming hobbies. To pacify myself, I told myself that I am not stopping FOREVER, but just for now. It worked. Most of them are gone, I continue with a few, and I occasionally dabble with one or two that I put away.
It's OK to have 199 interests. It's also OK to have 100. Or 10. Or 5. Or 2.
There may be times when you can't give any attention to hobbies at all. Sometimes work, family, or health require your full attention. In life, there are important things, and really friggin' important things. Hobbies are merely important.
1. List all your interests. 2. Circle the top 5. 3. Do those 5. Avoid the other 195 at all costs.
There are a lot of articles about it. It’s called the 5/25 method.
But most importantly, get the basic skills needed for sef improvement in a field well built before doing the jumping, growth cannot flourish in a bad foundation.
The good thing is a lot of that is lying dormant in wait so the plan I came up with back then was to hone the few since I wasn't born rich (been grinding the past decade) and make some good money, semi-retire and resume what I can in my late 30s when I don't have to work 24/7. I'd love to get up one day and just make pottery, paint or come up with ambient music in fl studio.
My overall lesson and what I've found to work and be happy is don't chase "mastery", being proficient enough to enjoy the activity is good enough, I can juggle a ball but I can't do advanced tricks and that's fine, I can sculpt a bust but I can't get the anatomy 100% like a true artisan, my paintings won't sell but they look good on my walls, I can make music others would listen to but it won't become a viral hit and lastly in my dedicated field I can write good enough code to live great life but I won't ever be a geohot or John Carmack or some bit shifting wizard.
I won't claim the book changed my life, nor is anything in it really revolutionary, but it did help me feel a bit better and finding some new tools for dealing with it, after struggling with exactly the same thing as you for 2 decades.
I would say try something like invest a third of your time and stuff that will help your career.
And invest a third your time in learning new stuff.
And use a third of your time pursuing things that are keeping your interest.
The other piece that I think is really important is you don't have to do all 200 at the same time.
You gave the example of woodworking, it looks like you had a fun time doing it and you enjoyed the work. But you got to a point where it's not your primary passion. That's okay. You can always pick it up later.
I try to take the time to do one or two things in depth as a current interest. But when it ceases to be fun I set it aside.
One of my hobbies that I really enjoy is bicycling. There have been times in my life where I spend 10 hours a week. And there are times in my life where I kind of let it lapse, but I'm back to doing it again and I'm enjoying it.
In general, we live a long time, and the stuff we're interested in will change over time. And the stuff you learned today, will always provide a foundation for your future interest tomorrow.
So give yourself a pass. You don't have to do it all at once. Interesting stuff isn't going away.
Start with a group of interests that has the most overlaps in terms of skills or resources needed - call these compounded projects. Out of the compounded projects, start with the one that interests you with 2 weeks of effort. If you can’t make a significant progress in that time frame, you either lack the skills, resource, or interests in them. Move onto the next compounded project.
After you finish with the list of compounded projects, review the original list and prioritize the interests based on your experience. Create compounded projects again and go at it. Repeat.
What I would recommend is to truly question what is the deep root of the interest ("where does it comes from") : Is it in reaction (for example, is it to escape something ? Is it because it's easier to have an other interest than to push when it becomes a bit harder? ...) ? What has captured your interest precisely at this moment ? If you answer all these kind of questions, I think things will begin to sort out already naturally.
If I go deeper in the answer, as we all are mostly in "productivity-oriented life" (or at least utilitarist-oriented life), our environment (friends, life, ...) tend to push us to do things which "has to" be "useful". Useful for our advancement in career, useful for an instantaneous joy, ... But when we reason like that, we tend to forget that not everything has to be useful. It's good to be passionated. To have many interests. Even not useful.
Just be gentle with yourself. In the end, it's not a race to the bottom. It's YOUR life, not the others, and it's yours to choose what you want to do with it.
Secondly however I'd suggest spending a bit of time getting crystal clear on what values drive your life right now. Identifying the top few can give you a chance to cross reference the "200 interest" and start settling in on the ones that truly satisfy your core values.
While again this might not take away the "sting" of putting interests on pause, it will allow you to feel completely fulfilled with the interests you do decide to act on. VIA character strengths is long but a great resource out of the UPENN positive psych department. Link below.
https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/resources/questionnaires-researche...
I feel you just need a couple of months dedicating some time most days to get to a basic level, or a bit beyond that. It’s only when you reach intermediate levels that you start to see diminishing returns from the time invested. So, I define 1-2 things I want to focus on for the next couple of months and ignore all the others. Then, depending on how things went, I continue with the same or move on to others. I have an hour reserved each to day to do whatever the current focus is.
For example, a couple of years ago, I spent a good amount of the year learning to play guitar to say a advanced beginner level. I know I’ll never become a virtuoso, not even will I be able to play most of the things I like to listen to. But that doesn’t mean it’s not immensely enjoyable to just sit down every now and then and noodle around on the instrument for relaxation.
E.g. if you train to run 5k in 15 minutes (vvv hard, will consume much of your life for a long time), then return to a lower volume program, you won’t be able to run as fast but you’ll still be much, much faster than average.
So you prioritise. Pick something to do now, and say ‘I am doing this for June. In July I shall do this other thing.’ Maybe a SMART goal for the month. Stick to your schedule. Once it’s over, don’t forget the skill, but prioritise your new focus.
Having a back-catalog of skills is so much fun. They may only be 80% of what they were but that’s enough for 95% of cases.
Personally, I enjoy at least writing down the ideas, passions, or motivations I have towards them somewhere and collecting them. Then, if the time comes when I choose that interest or topic, I already have a good bunch of well-marinated ideas. Of course, that can also overwhelm me, but then you just go to step 1 again!
As I've aged, I've become much more interested in doing a few things well. This has necessarily meant reducing the number of hobbies I engage with.
I believe that finding balance is the single hardest task in life, and I don't think you're alone in struggling to find balance. I would encourage you to follow as many interests as is feasible without compromising your health or wellbeing, until (and if) you decide to narrow your interests in the future.
Then find a long-term project to work on that you can get back to whenever you get bored with one of the other 199 interests. That way you get to have a sense of progress without getting bored.
The one hobby that I have massively cut down on is woodworking. I still have the tools, but I almost never do it now. It's noisy, dirty, dangerous, and expensive. So it's pretty easy to decide to give up on, in favor of other hobbies.
I have actually pulled out normal saws and done my best a few times in the last year, because I didn't want to make a ton of noise early in the morning... But they were just utilitarian cuts, no matter how I tried. Absolutely nothing to brag about.
I'm personally still working on this problem, and just in the last week found this[1] SLYT video. It was helpful.
[0]: https://www.oliverburkeman.com/books [1]: https://youtu.be/-AdXIC44b7Q?si=J5CGx5YJBTqMFSV7
To that end, I now feel that it's OK to de-prioritise some interests sometimes, or to just dip in for a short while. And in other interests I spend some time mentally planning and then going step by step and chipping away at progress.
Life is long, take your time.
From my experience random good things happen when you can balance things.
You just have to prioritise and cull based on your own personal set of factors. Things along the lines of:
- what makes you (the most?) money?
- what keeps you healthy?
- what keeps you sane?
- what do you enjoy the most?
- what maintenance is necessary?
All the things you don't have time for, make a list of them as backups in case others fall through.
One somewhat odd thing of mine is to delay gaming until I'm actually less able to do physical pursuits that I enjoy and contribute to my physical health. This is partially a reaction to being essentially gaming-sober for a good decade and a bit; but I still hear the call every now and then.
P.S. just wait until you have kids...
One interest, multiple domains. haha
For me, I'm definitely putting more effort into things I'm relatively skilled in (both inherent, and due to prior work/historical advantage/access/etc.). Also stuff with the highest return on effort for the amount of effort I'm reasonably likely to put into it (so, something which requires 100 hours to get any result is still possibly ok, but something which requires 4000 hours/yr for 10 years to get any result is much less interesting; something which requires 4000h/yr for 10 years but with incremental rewards, maybe.
Also helps when interests are clustered -- I like hardware, and security, and infrastructure, and crypto, and finance, and satellites, and communications, and military/next gen drone stuff, and interesting legal and jurisdictional arbitrage, and there's a lot of crossover among those, more so than adding other interests outside of that galaxy like art.
Keeping enough spare time/other capacity to take advantage of opportunities as they come up is good, too. e.g. I'm interested in semiconductor fab stuff, but not at a deep professional level doing anything in it, but when I get a chance to work on (security, infra) in that context, I jump on it.
Just fucking with you.
Try one thing at a time. If you have 200 interests, I guarantee you that you've never actually done most of them. Pick one, any one, and do it. Set aside some time (ideally 90 minutes) and do it every day for two weeks. You may find that you like the idea of the thing more than you like actually doing that thing. If you really enjoy it, keep doing it and ignore the rest! If you don't like doing that thing, pick another of your 200 out of a hat and try that for two weeks.
There is no perfect balance.
Do the things that you think will work best for you.
You are seduced by the feeling of excitement which is easy to conflate with progress and competence.
I guess some interests will have be postponed for some other time some other life some other you.
Peace.
For me, it is to have joy, by glorifying God through learning and service to others. And he gives us all, in return. We all have to choose.
(I agree; it is a hard problem.)
(Thoughtful comments appreciated with any downvotes.)
Good luck.