< Gift Horses

~marginalia

Something I've struggled with, and I feel you may relate to, is enjoying the process.

I sit down to write something, and I fret about how this isn't going to be a bestseller. I read a book on philosophy, and I worry about how nobody I won't be able to become a world leading expert in this author without an academic degree in philosophy. The focus is all on how it will look in my autobiography, rather than on the thing I'm doing.

Turns out, I like writing stuff. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not; my writing gets better when I do write. I do my best writing when I just get inspired and sit down and put it to paper (or rather screen). I do awful writing when I'm fishing for a reaction of some sort. Will I ever publish anything, who even knows. Do I even want to be an author? I dunno. I have job. Maybe I don't need that.

Turns out, I like reading philosophy books. I write about what I read too sometimes and sometimes my points are good, other times they are trite. It's still a rewarding process.

The more I just let go of trying to achieve these measures of success, the more liberty I've found in doing things that are rewarding to me. For example: I have a website that gets very little traffic. I don't care. I don't even extract visitor statistics. I enjoy adding to it. If someone reads what I write that's great, if they don't, it's still great. I write for me. I don't want you to sign up to my news letter. I'm not trying to live off this. It's just a hobby. My website is a success to me because I enjoyed making it. That's the only success I really care about.

Letting go of this pressure to succeed in the eyes of everyone else has liberated me, let me dabble. I've always done a lot of programming ever since I was a child, but often I've programmed stuff in the hopes other people will find it useful, rarely they did, and I didn't find what I built useful either because I had made all these compromises I thought other people wanted. Now I just build stuff for myself. I make what I want, not what I think other people want. I sometimes offer it to other people too as a kindness, but I judge my own success.

It's taken a long while to find this... I don't know what to call it, a spirit, will, or maybe sense of agency, but I realize now that it was sorely lacking most of my life: I get to just do stuff because I want to do them. I am the only one who gets to decide what I do. I get to decide to ignore what is going to lead to success in the eyes of others, ignore what everyone else is doing; and just do my things.

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~zampano wrote:

I can definitely relate to everything you've said. For me the time element is a little bit different, though, in the sense that I *used* to have no problem just doing stuff for the sake of doing it. It's only as I've gotten older that I've begun to wish I had some kind of specialization, something I could claim authority on.