One thing I have been wanting to do this summer, and have sorely avoided, is learning new skills. I get my ineptitude; simply a result of laziness coupled with an era of cheatable schooling has allowed me to blossom horizontally. I have no depth in the areas I yearn for understanding, and yet I see any investment as an anchor to failure. My dreams tell me im bound to hundreds of directions, turning my life into pre-renaissance torture. So, what can I do to fix this? I have a month left before I work in person and end up having aorund 4/5 hours of free time each day, vs 30 free full days. So I will take this space to plan out multiple things I can do.
For starters, lets look at where I have been failing! When you attempt to learn something for the first time and fail to do so, there must be a driving reason, whether it is your own ineptitude or the way you approach it. In the past, I have tried making my own website and updating it consistently, tried being a gym rat, learning how to sew and knit, and get into film. The prevalent reasoning I see in most of these hobbies is the motivation for consistency. My progress is negatively exponential, as is a lot of interests, but such progressive development causes my consistency to be negative as well; I put my all into the first and second try, but continuing just is impossible. Why?
Here I can see one pot sticker; my laziness. This is not necessarily bad, but the procrastination that comes with my constant boredom is a nightmare. I feel the need to do something at all times, and I delay doing the skill in an alotted time because I feel that that amount of effort is it's own waste of time. I also seem to use easy entertainment as a crutch, reaching for my phone as I wait for a page to load or to reset my fingers.
But going to the gym worked last summer because I had a friend to push me, and tennis has worked this summer because I have friends that get me to come; I am entirely externally motivated. But I dont think this is bad! Tennis is my highlight of the week in my mostly boring day-to-day, and I must learn from this. I think if I can set contracts with friends on certain hobbies or interests, I can start to form good habits. The second error seems to be me biting off too much to chew; trying to learn all these things in a day when I am only really capable of learning one thing to an adequate amount. So the second step will be to limit my interests into digestable blocks; let me spread my interests across blocks of weeks rather than hours, andI will achieve the same with due diligence.
I now have a doubled framework - play with friends, and keep it simple. What's next? Let's make our choice of work on what hobby or skill I want to develop. I want one to be athletic, one to be hands-on,and one to be intellectual. That's alot, so I think what I can do is keep the hands-on limited to a small project every once in a while; something as small as replacing oil or soldering a board. Athletic wise, I have some things in lock already; tennis a couple days a week, and walking most days. But I realize that this isn't building muscle, and my restful and lethargic life has made me weaker and caused issues with my ability to get better at tennis. I need the gym! But without a friend to go with, I am at a bit of a loss, and this will not be a problem when I go back to my university school in a the fall (as I have my roomates). I think in this situation, it is best to try a combination of at-home excersizes and machines at the gym. Getting weights is inconvenient, so I will replace the bench press and squat machine with pushups and squats. For shoulder excersies I can use the machine, and I can do a couple quick bicep and tricep excerises when I need to. Keeping it easy and quick can make all the difference. I'll take frequency with short workout time over lacksaidsical hard workouts.
Intellectually, there is a couple of goals I can see myself doing. One would be getting better at html here! Making this website look good would be very fun. My halfstep there would be asking a friend for help regarding setting up webpage connection pages, since that is what seems to make it the most annoying. Another step would be getting really good at basic SQL and memory of it, since thats what I will be working in the fall on. But I think if I can get a basic grasp on sql and tableau, I can learn the rest on the job, so I think I'll keep this one to learning for a couple days. I also have aims to make an app and I want to get better at writing and I want to dry and AGH! SO much to do. Seeing my friend pull out a little notebook and start just drawing something he found online seems very fun, and I think I might just copy him. I guess the best bet with smaller interests like this is - get a device that singles this interest out (drawing notebook), make it easy to access (small and portable for backpack) and find a time during the day for which one can use this (during transit, in the morning while waiting for food to cook, during lunch). This way, I can get slightly better at drawing through repetition. Things like that, or learning how to use an abacus, seem like great interests, which I think leads to my next thought.
My best bet is compiling a list of all the skills I want to learn or at least have a baseline interest in. That way I can paste this somewhere frequent and then come to cross it off once I make it consistent!