nikhil.io

On Side-Projects

I stumbled upon a book called Refuse to Choose and it’s about a personality type (that is definitely not ADHD) that happens to want to do a lot of things (sometimes in parallel or in sequence). It was very comforting to know others struggle with this and this book helps you to be ok with it. I wouldn’t say it “cured” me but I think about it differently now and use it more to my advantage. Worth a read at a minimum.

There was one very profound idea in this book that goes like this:

“If you are no longer interested in a project you started, maybe you already got what you came for”.

In essence, maybe it’s not the finishing of the project you came for but maybe the learning or understanding of how it could be done if it were to be done.

This realization is interesting for someone who exhibits this behavior. When I was a kid, I loved to build legos but after following the instructions and building a kit, I wouldn’t touch it again. As I think back now, it likely was because “I got what I came for” (the challenge of putting it together was more interesting to me than the end product).

@ryeguy_24