It's fascinating how many opportunities we have these days in the technology-enriched world. It can sometimes feel overwhelming, confusing, or even frustrating in facing such an abundance of choices.
These days, it's becoming more and more essential to have a clear purpose and focus. On the one side, it's a pure luxury problem, a great opportunity our ancestors couldn't imagine dreaming. But on the other side, no one before us ever thought about how to deal with so many possibilities and distractions.
I'm asking myself each quarter when I sit down to plan for the next one, what should I focus on concerning my professional career and personal development. How can I get the most out of my time? What are the most crucial bottlenecks I need to tackle to achieve more? What's the smartest thing for me to do, given my current knowledge and situation?
For instance, I bought many books over the past couple of years. I'm now starting to realize that I can't read them all in the near future. I might not even get the time to read some of them at all. I bought many books in a rush feeling they might be useful later. Once I finished a particular book, I go off and buy some of the referenced textbooks. They might be helpful later on in my journey. That's at least the "ratio" behind it.
I guess it's some sense of greed that drives us to want too much at the same time. I need to learn to be content with little and become proficient in one specific area. Talking about my professional development, I want to be an expert in so many domains. But thinking more thoroughly about it, I conclude that I might either become a generalist or just an expert in a well-confined field. Becoming a master in only one domain might open the perspective and grow from there into other realms.
One interesting thought that came to me is to focus on progress rather than on products or outcomes. It's far more favorable because it's less overwhelming and puts us in the direction towards the goal. It boils down to this: We're often missing our dreams because we lack perspective about the next steps toward these goals. Some plans in life seem way too big or unattainable. But over time, as we progress, we come to a point where we reassess our situation, and certain goals seem achievable then.
I know that my first couple of blog posts here will not be well written and that I have to improve my writing skills significantly. But how do I get there if not starting to write more and eventually become better? So here we go.
And about the book collection problem of mine. I started to develop a web application to collect all my notes about books. Because reading books is only part of the quest. Remembering, organizing ideas, notes, and short summaries are all part of getting the most out of my library. The project should become open source, and I want to host one public instance for shared ideas. It's going to be like a wiki but in a visually enhanced way, striving for a hierarchical knowledge system as I progress.
The only thing left to do is to progress. And as I progress, the blog posts will become more technical, describing the tools and technologies I'm using to build the mentioned app idea. I'm still trying to find a suitable name for it.
