I am interested in a thousand things. When I look up at the sky, I wonder how clouds form. When I look at a building, I wonder what makes it beautiful. When I look at the cars lined up in the narrow street where I live, I wonder how we can make cities more livable.
When you have this many questions about everything, you quickly realize that you have to choose. I don't have enough time to read a book about meteorology and take a course in architecture and read long articles on urban planning blogs. I have to choose what I want to focus on, and so does everyone else who's interested in many things.
The question then becomes, what do you choose? After all, the gateway to mastery is the ability to focus on something for years on end. So what do you choose that will keep your attention for that long?
Some people figure this out early in their life. They know what they want and can focus on it for a long time. But for those whose interests vary widely, knowing what to focus on isn't that straightforward. Everything seems at least kind of interesting, but you won't know what you find really interesting until you spend much more time on it.
One of the best ways to try out more of the things you find kind of interesting to figure out what you find really interesting is to shorten your deliverables.
What's the shortest possible amount of work that will deliver a complete result? That's what you should aim for. Take one pottery class and mold a clay pot. Build a to-do app in Kotlin before you think you're ready. Write a blog post about the history book you just read.
Create something tangible and see whether you find it interesting enough to continue focusing on. This is how you try new things and, ultimately, find what you're passionate about.
That's not all. Shortening deliverables is also a good way to stay motivated. It's satisfying to tick off items on your to-do list or move Trello cards on your Kanban board. Short deliverables make it feel as if you're making progress, which, in turn, encourages you to keep going.
Being interested in many things certainly isn't a bad thing. If anything, it's important to cultivate your curiosity and understand that there's depth everywhere in everything. But it's equally important to make something your main thing. Finding what that is and sticking with it is a matter of shortening your deliverables.
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