Impulse

At a recent pho­tog­ra­phy meet­ing, Chris Petrich said, “If you want to do some­thing, you have to do a project, then do another, then do another, and keep doing that.” Later that evening, my friend Amanda told me the same thing, ver­ba­tim. Becky, another friend, unknow­ingly quoted them both the next day. Three peo­ple inde­pen­dently say­ing the exact same thing within 24 hours.
Alright already! I get the hint.

As you can see by the cat­e­gory list on this blog, I have a broad range of inter­ests. I tend to be a gen­er­al­ist by nature — learn­ing a lit­tle about sev­eral fields of study, then apply­ing ideas from one field to another. I also just love to learn new things. This bent cre­ates an inter­est­ing prob­lem: when you’re inter­ested in every­thing, it’s very, very hard to pick only one thing to work on. Thing is, if I don’t pick some­thing, I’ll never get any­thing done.
Knowing this, I’ve been try­ing to pick a par­tic­u­lar field to con­cen­trate in. It’s a strug­gle. Saying yes to one thing means say­ing no to every­thing else. The approach of choos­ing a project and see­ing where it will lead (instead of choos­ing a field first), is an appeal­ing idea. I’m not say­ing no to any­thing, just not now. It allows a lit­tle bit of wan­der­ing and explo­ration. It gets me work­ing on some­thing. It also short-circuits my per­fec­tion­ist delu­sions of grandeur by focus­ing me on some­thing con­crete I can get done in a short time frame. Since the project is by nature short-term, I don’t have to think so hard about it — I can go with my instinct.
So, I’ve picked a project: being inter­ested in dig­i­tal sto­ry­telling, I’m doing a short piece on my sis­ter. I’ve already fin­ished the first draft. After this project, I’ll pick another project and do it. Then, I’ll do another. After a while, I’ll look back and say, “oh, that’s what I’ve been doing.”