Key to Happiness
Originally published at Kirby's Dreamlands. You can comment here or there.
There’s a lot of things that, to some degree, we’d all like to do. For me, this list is something like:
* Contribute to an open source Perl project
* Write a novel
* Travel to a variety of exotic places
* Learn to play a musical instrument well
* Learn to speak Chinese
and so on.
I could do any of these things. (There are other types of goals, like Be A Billionaire or Live on Mars or Conquer France that are a bit more out of reach, and are not in the scope of this discussion.)
So the trick is, when I come across one of these ‘would like to’ things, really think about it. What would it take, what would be the reward? And if I end up, like for most of these things, to just ‘would like to have done’, okay, I don’t actually want to do it. The Musical Instrument goal is strongly in this camp for me.
But the other side is, when I come across one that you end up going, “Huh, I really could do that.” I must let nothing stop me. It’s an actual life goal. These are precious, valuable things, and once I’ve separated out all the fakey goals and can see the real ones, there’s no excuse not to do them.
I think I accidentally stumbled across one of these this weekend. I don’t want to set any expectations, so more on that when I’m further along, but it’s actually a lot of fun to realize you want to do a project, and then start doing it and realize that yes, this is only mildly insane and well within reach!