What Now?

Hello everyone,

I'm feeling a bit down this week because I'm at an impasse. This is because I feel like I've done a lot throughout the year to set up what I will do for the summer, and I've been waiting to have time to work on personal projects for a while.

But now that I'm here, I feel demotivated and out of my depth starting all the engineering projects I want to.

So, my question of the day for myself and you all is: what now?

How can I regain the motivation to make cool things? How do I learn to do the things I want to do on my own?

Here are some tips I found and thought about for myself (hopefully they can help you too):

Have some fun.
1. It's very difficult to build confidence or skill if you're not making the thing you're working on interesting for yourself. So, have some fun with the projects you're doing on your own because that's the only way you'll be continually motivated to work on it.
Slow progress is good progress.
1. If your progress is unnecessarily slow, that's bad. However, as long as you are moving forward you can start to build momentum. Worry not about the speed of your progress, but the direction your progress is in and you will eventually succeed. Often, what's slow to you is fast to the world - especially if what you're creating is novel and useful.
Talk to others.
1. Growth is a hard process, but it gets less hard if you have someone to grow with. Remember, you are not alone - there will always be someone working just as you are on something that means a lot to them. If you reach out, maybe you can help each other.
Perfect is the enemy of good. Apathy is the enemy of progress.
1. Some things are meant to be just good enough. There's always time to go back and fix things. But if you focus on perfection too much, often you'll become demotivated or apathetic - feeling like if you can't do something perfectly, it's better not to do it at all.
2. Good enough -> better is how you reach very good. Nothing -> perfection is how you burn out.

That's all for this week. Hope you enjoyed or learned something! Better yet, I hope you thought of something new you'd like to do in the next few weeks.

See you next week,

-Ethan