We’ve all got those projects that we would do if we had more time. We imagine reading all those books on our reading list, recipes to try out, taking up bouldering, launching that side hustle. But imagining all these projects never gets you any closer to realising them.
I’m usually trying to juggle a bunch of things at the same time. Wanting to learn Khmer, practice the guitar, have a social life, take photos, be a good husband, write blog posts, film passion projects and do client work. For starters.
I recently read this article that argues against having all these scattered commitments, and our modern culture against commitment in general.
“It’s more fun to think about being good at something than to actually do they work to get good” – Scott Young
The solution is to choose just one project: learn a new language, learn to draw, learn a new skill – whatever. Pick one and just go for it for 30 days. It’s a hort enough timeframe that it’s relatively easy commit to, but long enough that it’ll force you to tackle the projects you really care about.
The flip side to this is that I believe many skills work best when you practice them every day, even if just a little. Things like practising an instrument, learning some new words in a language. You’ll be better off spending 15 minutes a day doing these little things, and doing it for a whole year. Rather than, say, committing 1 hour/day to the same skill for 3 months and then never doing them again. I think Scott’s thesis relates more to certain areas of life such as work, where you’re likely to be juggling multiple projects at once.
Still, I think it’s a great idea. Imagine working on 12 different month-long projects over the course of a year? Or four 3-month projects. What skills could you learn? What meaningful projects would you go after? For me I’d like to learn more about graphic design, marketing, branding, writing and of course filmmaking. So I will look at picking one of these.
Clean Energy Week 2021
In other news, this week Clean Energy Week 2021 is officially launched! I was really honoured to be there for the launch event, which for this year took place in Kampong Speu, Cambodia’s second largest solar farm at 80MW. To kick off the launch, I got to film the Ambassador of Australia to Cambodia giving the commencement speech and Clean Energy Award. We had influencers, social media crew and SchneiTec Group all on the scene.
To find out more about Clean Energy Week and get involved, check out their website where you can also watch all the videos I’ve produced for their program this year:
http://cleanenergycambodia.org/cleanenergyweek
And here are some other tidbits of things I’ve found interesting over the past week:
🎧 Podcasts
“How Crypto Projects Like Loot are Rewriting the Playbook for Building Communities” from Means of Creation
https://www.airr.io/episode/6140fca8ab3f6c000f5ecc26
A super interesting podcast about some of the latest developments in the crypto space. Namely around NFTs and DAOs. It tells the story of Loot – selling NFTs that are nothing more than a few lines of text for hundreds of thousands of dollars, by creating a narrative and the prospect of being part of an exclusive community and having immense future value.
📃Articles
Reclaiming the joy of work:
https://www.nateliason.com/medley/283
There’s a negative part of our work culture, where we admonish people for being “obsessed” with their work and tell them that they should work less. But why is that? Many people associate working hard with working to reach status, money and climbing an imaginary ladder at the expense of personal health and meaningful relationships. Our schooling and corporate system ingrains this notion that work is about purely achieving some sort of reward in the future. Where its all about slaving away and enduring a job/class you hate today so that you can have a different job in the future that you might still hate (with higher pay and status).
Instead, we should be trying to find a deeper meaning to our work. Something that drives us with a raging fire to achieve a goals that are meaningful to us . It turns work into something fun, a game we can play forever. And there’s nothing wrong with “working” hard at that.
100 Days of Motion Design:
https://medium.com/the-100-day-project/100-days-of-motion-design-463526af852f
I found this article really inspiring and lines up well with the piece I wrote at the top of this post. This guy decided to spend every day for 100 days studying and practicing motion design. 100 days seems like a bit too much of a commitment though – I think I’ll just start with 30 days. Learning to draw and/or graphic design is something I’ve wanted to learn about for a while, so maybe I’ll start there. I like the way he walks you through his journey and shows his progress from start to finish.
How Memes Control Everything – Divinations – Every
https://every.to/divinations/how-memes-control-everything-8ef8ece7-58b3-45b7-b906-0b6acc48d387
An interesting dive into how memes aren’t just funny internet jokes, but actually part of our social fabric. They’re a way to mimic common behaviour so that we can become socially accepted. Much like catch phrases that came before internet memes.