

Ask HN: What criteria helps focus your interests? - halfcat

A few questions:<p>1) Should interests be limited in the name of doing something meaningful?<p>2) If interests should be limited, how do you determine what is worth spending time on so that you do not regret it after investing a significant amount of time?<p>3) Put another way, how do you avoid wasting your life consuming mind candy?<p>I spend a lot of time on the web, and in retrospect, I consider a lot of that time to have been wasted. I latch onto topics for brief periods (a few days or weeks), make big plans, then move on to a different interesting topic. I will spend large amounts of time on pretty meaningless tasks. I will spend a week messing with a music mashup that I know will make my brother laugh. He laughs. Now what? I feel like I wasted a week.<p>I over-analyze everything. I think part of what I enjoy is just analyzing things. I like to analyze chess games. I might spend a week or more analyzing one interesting game. Then what? I feel like I&#x27;ve wasted a week, even though the process was intellectually stimulating. There are hundreds of other topics that I will do this with. I will hear a comedian interviewed, and realize there is some science to comedy and what makes someone laugh, so I spend a week semi-obsessing over how to deconstruct and analyze comedy routines. Or I realize that I can compile a database of chord progressions for millions of songs and make a mashup generator. After a week or two, something else interesting comes along.<p>Is the answer to discover your meta-hobby, deconstructing and analyzing things in my case, and then apply that in some area that benefits others?
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adam419
I completely relate. I find myself drawn between so many things I never end up
truly immersing myself into one thing for long enough to get the big benefits
I've identified at the onset. Something else always comes along that I end up
jumping to.

