Why do I grow an interest in many things but find it hard to stick to something?
Currently, I'm reading "The Almanack of Naval Ravikant" and it's all about building something which could scale and have high leverage if you want to succeed.
It's just a blueprint of being successful and wealthy. But the difficult part is to identify your actual interests.
Once you have clarity on what you can do better than the rest of the world you will succeed for sure. However, it takes decades to build that knowledge, and your interests change in different life stages.
So, how is it possible to stick with just one interest that can make you wealthy?
My problem is I don't stick to one thing for too long. Is it even possible?
What are your thoughts? Join the conversation here https://t.me/joinchat/UCTJGj30lkT_2thC
If you're like me and my clients, you probably love satisfying your curiosity. You put in 20% of the work to build 80% of the thing. Once you build the 80%, you've already learned a lot and probably have a clearer idea of the challenges and downsides. But now there is a new project that is calling to you which you're eager to learn about!
That's a cycle a lot of people, particularly entrepreneurs, face.
How do you get past that?
I like to use a strategy I call Landing the Next Jumbo. Imagine your unfinished projects as a mess of jumbo jets flying around. You are the air traffic controller. Your job is to assess the status of all your jumbos (projects), find the one that you can land (finish) the quickest, and get to safely to the runway.
"Landing the Next Jumbo" - is it actually a technique or you just made it up yourself?
Interesting to know about this.
I came across it in a workshop series years ago. I forget what they actually called it, but they did use the plane analogy. The presenters were fairly well known experts in motivation science, though I think the strategy was part of their bigger program. I haven't seen it published, so can't vouch for the science, but I do find it useful anecdotally with myself and clients.
Edit. I remembered the guys name: Hugh Kearns
The best quote I have heard around this is
We can have a career as a bootstrapper. We can build different things and jump from one to another. But, if we really know what we care about then we can look for problems to solve in that area. That's why people specialize in industries, because it means you are focusing on solving one problem deeply.
If you pick a big enough and important enough problem, you will probably spend your entire life working on it. That's a calling and that is almost always true for most outstanding people in any sector or job function -
Politics - Mandela, Gandhi, Lincoln and many more
Research - All the Nobel laureates
Business - Bezos, Gates, Reid Hastings
Medicine - Dr. Trehan in India, Dr. Fauci and many other outstanding health professionals.
These people have a calling because they have told themselves a story to convince their brain to focus on solving problems in a specific area. You can always expand later but nothing big was ever built by changing focus every 3-5 years.
Elon Musk is a weird exception to this. He can go across industries and work on very ambitious ideas all at once. That's crazy.
Himanshu, there are people on this platform who build stuff, make it big and take a good exit in merely 8 to 9 months. I aspire to become like them.
What are you solving?
Interesting. Yes, I can observe that behavior in myself as well. First I think it's natural that you kind of want to follow new shiny objects because they release Dopamin and other happy Hormones.
Secondly, what I can see in my own behavior is that it's something you have to train. You have to start finishing projects before moving on. It's like a muscle. Instead of "giving up" and jumping to the next project finish it. Whatever "finishing" means but get it to a level where you either did confirm that there is truly no interest. Instead of jumping off along the way because you got bored or found something better.
Actually, a good friend of mine really taught me a lesson by telling me "there will always be something better". It was in a relationship context. But a lot of the lessons that she taught me about relationships is something that I applied to business.
Lessons like:
Hope that helps
Thanks for this real advice @stefanie
I should give it some more thought. I still don't have clarity on what does "finish" means to me.
It is because you quit the moment it gets hard, which is a common occurrence when launching new products.
Not sure is hard stuff boring too?
I think you are not alone! I can relate that sticking to something is difficult.
I mean for me easy to build things and difficult to make them grow.