
Starting Many Things - Jetroid
https://jetholt.com/micro/starting-many-things/
======
mnjn
I can’t count the number of projects I’ve started (but not finished) in
varying types of hobbies, including but not limited to card magic, music
production, videography, creative writing, and of course software development.

Although I used to feel bad about all my “failed” projects, I have recently
come to view them as all part of my growth. I tend to cycle between hobbies
for whatever reason, and every time I come back to a hobby, I get a little
better at it, and I think that’s what really matters in the end. Though I
haven’t gone back to card magic in a while haha.

~~~
limomium
All the unfinished work begins to come together as a coherent whole, at some
point. Concepts join, ideas merge, good parts stay and not so good parts fall
off. Everything you've ever started is leading up to something. It'll come.
You can't see it yet because it's something new. Something magnificent.
Something worth all that effort. And when it does come, you will know. You
will feel. And you will regret nothing.

~~~
jkhdigital
Having an economics education, I like to think of this in simple economic
terms: Everything has a production process, and during that process the
unfinished goods are generally useless, or at least far less useful than the
finished product. Economic development is, in some sense, the steady expansion
of the scope and scale of production processes that society can engage in. I
think the complexity of the modern economy along with globalization have drawn
out the “production process” for building highly useful human beings as well.
In any case, I guess my main point is that you have no idea how valuable your
unique mix of skills will be until it is “complete”, and that may take
decades, but the payoff for building that skill set can be orders of magnitude
larger than a “normal” path.

------
aazaa
This post appears to be part of an experiment in "micro posting":

> Usually, I try to aim for a certain standard of quality in my writing, and
> this can really hold me up from writing about something I want to write
> about.

> Sometimes it takes a week or more just to write one post. Yeah, perfection
> is killer.

> It gets worse when I add images, because I agonise over them.

> So I’m going to be writing more things to a lower quality. I’m calling these
> ‘Micro’ posts, and you can find a full list here: Micro.

> They will be just what I’m thinking about, or some small observations, or
> whatever. Generally without pictures, without proofreading, without
> rewording each sentence hundreds of times. Almost as if I have a typewriter
> and a stream of conciousness - no going back to make changes.

[https://jetholt.com/may-2020-microblogs/](https://jetholt.com/may-2020-microblogs/)

This idea also fits in with the topic at hand: starting many things. With a
rapid-fire, just-get-it-out "micro" posting style, you can spend a little time
considering far more ideas than you would have before.

The funny thing is that it would have never occurred to me that this
particular post was written in this way because it seems very well conceived
and organized.

~~~
Jetroid
That's a great perspective, thank you.

Funnily enough, I'd consider this post to be on the borderline between a
micropost and a regular post.

Of all of my microposts, it's the one that I dedicated the most time to -
though still much less than a post that would go on the homepage.

You've really hit the nail on the head though. By writing every day-ish, it
lead me to start this post, which made me realise that I needed/wanted to
dedicate a lot of time to to fully explain and say what was on my mind. (I
reordered some of the paragraphs and added bits here and there, which I didn't
do for most microposts to keep them 'micro')

By trying lots of posts, I found one that I wanted to go into detail with,
which ultimately lead to it being the first post of mine to rank on the HN
front page. Wow!

------
cushychicken
_Like how Brian May, lead guitarist for Queen, became an astrophysicist.
That’s completely different from what he became famous for, and it makes him
unique and interesting to talk about. He isn’t “just another musician” any
more._

This is actually the reverse of what happened. Brian May _left_ a career in
astrophysics to pursue Queen in 1974, once Queen started getting big. He was
about 6 months away from defending his dissertation and earning his PhD. He
re-enrolled in his PhD program in 2006, and earned his doctorate in 2007.

Doesn't detract from the author's point, however. Try a lot of stuff. You
never know which bet will work out. Just so happened that, for Brian May,
being a rock star panned out first!

~~~
exlurker
Guitarist, astrophysicist, and even a hardcore gardener!

[https://www.spin.com/2020/05/queens-brian-may-tore-his-
butt-...](https://www.spin.com/2020/05/queens-brian-may-tore-his-butt-muscle-
while-gardening/)

~~~
cushychicken
I love gardening too, but I've never done _anything_ that approaches the level
of enthusiasm required to tear a butt muscle while gardening.

Dude's in a league of his own. XD

~~~
yowlingcat
Great accomplishments often require certain sacrifices.

------
luxurytent
I find in many respects I begin things not to aim for mastery but to scratch
an itch. Some hobbies require deeper investment but ... I felt like making
home made pasta at home last month, so I just did it. Scratched that itch and
no desire to make pasta anytime soon.

Similar feeling to anything development related. I wanted to tinker with
threejs. So I built a simple brick builder in it. Pushed the code to GitHub
once I was happy and moved on.

------
catchmeifyoucan
This is the exact article I needed to read. I’ve been trying to wrap my head
around leaving work and making the jump to follow my interests. I’m going to
setup a website just like Pat. For example, I want to get my pilot’s license.
Whenever I want to dedicate myself to something, it feels like I can’t,
because 8hrs of my time are gone to work. It’s not that work is boring, just
that other things might be more interesting, and I can’t seem to strike that
balance.

------
bpicolo
> font-size: 1.4vw;

@op: this css rule currently makes it very hard to read the page on ultra-wide
monitors - the font is very large and doesn't scale with browser zoom.

~~~
Jetroid
I'm aware. I made this website's CSS before I knew about how to do
responsiveness properly. Almost everything is based on viewport widths in some
way. It's a real mess and I simply haven't had the time / seen the value to
change it. My tiny little site rarely gets any visitors worth talking about.

I'll try to do something about it soon. Thanks!

~~~
philzook
For what it's worth, my first impulse when I saw your blog was "Hey that's a
neat styling. I like it."

~~~
Jetroid
Thanks!

I think the styling is fine, it's just how it copes with responsiveness.

Try opening it on your phone and flipping over to landscape, or on an
ultrawide monitor, or even just resize your browser window to be really wide.

It's a mess, it makes me anxious every time I share something.

I know that I have to fix it for the edge cases but I kinda dread doing the
work to do that, haha.

------
zuhayeer
Want to point out that starting something every other day is very different
from starting many things. To build renowned things, knowledge has to
(usually) compound over periods of time / focus. You can’t expect to build
something overnight, achieve success and then hop on over to the next thing.
That’s why we never really refer to any meaningful project as “finished” in
that regard.

------
sharadov
Change the font, if you expect someone to read your article.

------
chris_st
> _" This is my personality - ... - I really enjoy learning about new
> things"_.

This is me in a nutshell. I wondered, in my teens, why I was so drawn to music
when I'd quit whatever instrument I was trying to learn. Turns out when I got
a good understanding, that was the good thing, and practicing the same song
enough times to get good at it was boring.

> _but is playing with being a DJ on Twitch._

I think that's a really great thing about where we are right now... you can
learn so much on the internet, and then _try it out_ and see if it's for you,
and get feedback. Nice!

------
JoeDaDude
Learning 12 skills in 12 months seems extreme to me, in particular, because a
lot of skills take long to master. Instead, I prefer the "theme of a season"
approach as espoused in this CGP Gray video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVGuFdX5guE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVGuFdX5guE)

------
cableshaft
I was aware of Exploration vs Exploitation in regards to A.I. but never really
thought of it in regards to living someone's life, so thanks for that.

If I never did any exploration, then I would have only ever been a writer. I
didn't decide to pursue computer science until after putting together a
personal website and programming games on my calculator while bored in class.

And if I never explored, I wouldn't have had any career in video games. While
it was how I initially started learning proper programming, I wasn't seriously
considering that as a career for.

And if I never explored, I wouldn't have gotten into designing board games,
which is basically just system design but a lot more fun.

And to get your games signed, you have to go to conventions and talk to
publishers, so I got used to traveling and getting more into that too. At
least before the pandemic.

Or learning languages, or playing tennis, or hiking, or learning musical
instruments, or drawing, or making electronic music, or cooking, or
photography.

And within those fields, without exploration, I wouldn't have gotten
recognition for multiple different game designs, and I wouldn't be writing
humorous fiction, and I wouldn't have come up with two new game designs (and a
total overhaul for another design) that got me really excited.

College, at least in the US, seem almost designed to facilitate that
exploration. The general education requirements let you have some exposure to
other fields, and you can choose to further explore the field by taking more
classes or even change your major if you wish. I think some people forget that
it's important to do that after they finish college sometimes, and get stuck
in a rut in life.

I am probably overdue for a new different hobby, myself. I did take an ESL
tutoring course just before the pandemic, but the pandemic hit before I got
assigned a student, so that's on hold. It was really interesting to discover
how to teach someone that can't speak your language very well, though, and I
think I can use those techniques for other things, like my game designs.

Probably my biggest problem is getting to a point where I can say something is
finished and move on to the next thing. Because of my background in games, I
want to make my game designs very polished, and get them developed by a
publisher, and whatnot, but that process takes a lot of work and a lot of time
to find a publisher for your designs.

Like I still only have one game signed, not even released, after 3 years of
pitching, meanwhile I have about 60 playable prototypes, about 15 of those
polished to the point where they almost could be finished products. Like I
created art, wrote rules, sell sheets, videos, etc...not professional art, but
some publishers have said "I would publish the game with that art" to a couple
of the games, so apparently not terrible.

I might try going the Kickstarter or crowd-sale or route at some point, but
that's a whole extra level of effort that I'm not sure I'm ready for.

~~~
Jetroid
Yes, when I got that lecture, it made me think about my own life and made me
wonder if I was just 'exploiting a local maxima' or if I was really on the
right path for optimality. I figured that it was almost certainly sub-optimal,
but without having many thousands and thousands of retries like an agent, what
can you do?

My path to where I am today also has many little 'chances' where my
exploration lead my in a completely different path that I wouldn't have been
on today.

Like when I was a young teenager, and discovered a forum about a video game
that I liked. From there, I picked up video game level design because I was
inspired by a couple of the posters. After a while of that, I discovered game
scripting, which lead me to pick up programming. When I entered Sixth Form at
school, I picked up Electronics on a whim and ended up realising that I really
liked assembly language. Things grew from there until I got to where I am
today.

------
jungletime
Good Farmers are great examples of these people. Just because random things
break (mechanical) that they need to fix. Build buildings, inventing creative
solutions to problems, manage a business, sometimes a large family, and animal
care too.

------
dfilppi
The odd thing is to choose a certain path in life because other people would
be interested in reading about it.

------
gmaster1440
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-
armed_bandit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit)

