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Comment by cschneid | Hacker News Reader

I agree. I have the habit of constantly learning, without producing. So I'll pick up side projects, suck the learning-marrow from their bones, and discard them without finishing.

I have so little to show in terms of actual work product, which I am attempting to fix with a similar "don't break the chain" approach.

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I have been in the same boat as you when it comes to side projects, but I'm curious about your use of the metaphor of "sucking the marrow from the bones" because that metaphor is typically used to describe completion to an extreme. For example, if "eating an animal" was your metaphor for working on a side project, I think that a more apt extension to that metaphor would be "leaving meat on the bone" rather than "sucking the marrow from the bones". However your metaphor refers to the marrow as "learning-marrow" which confuses the larger metaphor that is "eating an animal".

Have I completely misunderstood the extended metaphor you were trying to use?

Yeah, probably. Also I didn't think it through either.

I extract the goodies from whatever I'm learning, and never finish the project I'm learning from.

My attention shifts as soon as the project stops being interesting & new, and becomes "work" to finish up.

You gotta think of your project as you think of a woman you are in love with, otherwise, there's no sex. I think there is a lot in common between love, advancing in a project and even picking a movie to watch - they all involve a kind of 'sexual' openness towards the subject.

i know it's usually frowned upon to make jokes on HN, but it's amusing that this comment seems be sexualising everything and your user name is an anagram of "viagras"

It's actually a word in Sanskrit, meaning creative energy, but it has a secondary meaning of seed / discharge. And my comment sexualizing the relationship between a dev and his work is not a joke - I really believe that thing that allows us to enjoy such work that other find repulsive is a kind of attraction similar to sex. I'm using this insight for finding a good attitude towards my work - you know, you gotta admire the curves before you get into the mood. :-P

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