Do Something That You Have Never Done Before — Essay
As a strong believer in personal development, I realize that I will never be perfect. Despite this, a big part of the fun in life is working towards making yourself a better person. If you don’t do that, what else is there?
Over the past year, I’ve come to realize the importance of having positive habits, and how building a series of habits into your daily schedule is one of the best ways to make long-term, sustainable change. As my life goals are still undefined, my current focus is on building a repertoire of habits and skills so that over time, I’ll gradually become the person I’d like to be, with as little friction as possible.
In order to make yourself a better person, knowing which traits you’d like to eventually have is essential. since I first started working as a “professional developer”, my primary focus has been building a lot of different things — fast. Even when I was a high schooler and spent all my free time after school building projects, I’d exclusively focus on building lots of little services and command-line programs without much regard for their longevity.
I tend to get bored of working on the same thing for more than a couple of months, and really enjoy the thrill of starting projects, building them out until I’m satisfied, then putting them into maintenance mode and only thinking about them occasionally.
Unfortunately, while I’ve always put a lot of thought and consideration into the quality of my projects, I’ve come to realize that there is so much more I could do to not only improve the quality of these projects, but make them more successful, interesting, and usable.
It is now apparent to me that my lack of discipline and interest in ruthlessly focusing on the quality of my software (and life in general) has really been a personal vice.
After meeting so many great programmers and other people over the past several years, I’ve noticed something in common with all the people I admire: they ruthlessly focus on the quality of their projects, above all else. Regardless of whatever obstacles and hurdles they have to jump over to make things happen, they find a way to do it.
It’s not only incredibly impressive to me but also very humbling. Instead of being a person who’s known for the quantity of his output, I’d instead like to become a person known for the quality of his output.
A little bit of life advice to myself for future reference: the next time you’re not feeling great — feeling lonely, sad, whatever it may be — just get up and do something. No excuses. Want to sit there and feel bad for yourself? Grow up!
Sometimes you’ve got to be hard with yourself, there’s just no getting around it.
You’ve got to get up, go to the gym, and lift some heavyweights. You’ve to get that bike you want to buy and crush 20 miles or so. You’ve got to make a list of ideas you have that sound like fun, and start working on one of them until you can’t work anymore.
This is just how things go.
There’s no way you can ever feel 100% all of the time, but you can certainly try your best. Inaction is the worst sort of failure. It’s what weak-willed people do.
“There’s too much stuff to do, I can’t do anything.” Not with that attitude!
You’ve got to get out there and give it your absolute best. Turn off YouTube. Turn off Facebook or Instagram. All you need to do is get in there and keep fighting. Whatever you do, don’t give in to those feelings.
We’re just huge meat bags full of chemicals after all — are you going to let some minor chemical differences in some random region of your brain control your life? ARE YOU? Or are you going to concentrate on what you have to do, and do it?
That’s what I thought. Now get out there, and be awesome.
“Do What Excites!” @kellywakasa
Thanks for Reading…
Have a Great Day ahead :)
Gemechu Taye Hirpassa
