Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I've been in the same boat my whole life. But I'm currently working on a side project, and I've made substantial progress on it.

It arose as a natural fruit of a daily writing practice I instituted. That writing practice itself came out of a couple of things:

1. I owned my desire to create something. Instead of guilt tripping myself for not writing, imposing the "If you only had your shit together like everyone else, you'd etc etc etc" line of thinking on my behavior, I honestly looked at myself and said, "You know, this bothers you not because you're a bad person who can't get anything done, but because you want to write. If you decided not to write anything, you would still be a perfectly fine person and you could live a happy life."

2. I let go of the creative process as a way of achieving outcomes I wanted, and embraced it as a way to happily spend my free time and make things that satisfied my own standards.

A couple of months into my daily writing practice, it somehow mutated into a programming project. My programming still operates within the conceptual loop of my writing, but I suppose it could have turned into anything else.

My advice would be to reflect on what you're doing moment to moment and build a narrative around it. Sometimes it can be invaluable to just write down what happened: "Well, I was working on this roguelike in Rust, but then I saw some blog posts about Common Lisp and decided I'd write a graphical solitaire game in CL." And from there you can understand why it is you are doing what you are doing, which will probably be more effective than castigating yourself for doing what you're doing.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: