Lately I've been thinking about my life and the way I've been doing things. I've been thinking about the things I learned so far and most of the activities I've been doing for long enough. I have also been thinking, with a bit of sadness, about the fact that I never managed to make myself become quite good at anything I ever tried.
I always wondered why that was the case. I obviously enjoyed and still enjoy most of the things that I do, but I never found it easy to make myself become more than I already was. Sure, I embraced progress and growth, but it seemed weird to deliberately aim for such a thing. In a world that tells you to "practice, practice, practice", without offering much information about how to do it well, trying to find another way might seen weird at first.
It's only recently that I began to feel attracted to the idea of directness, of being very deliberate in my actions and planning as well as I can the tasks that need to be accomplished in order for me to achieve my goal.
I've been noticing that I began applying this type of thinking to quite a lot of the things that I do.
When I read, I don't only do it for the pleasure of it, but I also focus on the number of pages I go through, and I try to find ways in which to read more and more, to finish more books, and to begin others.
When I begin writing an article, I try to stop expecting my brain to come up with random ideas. Instead, I feel the need to go through multiple articles and find specific pieces of information that I can take and develop into articles myself.
Even when gaming I began to focus more on objectives and what I need to do, and the right way to do it, than to just aimlessly go around the world, hoping that I'll find things to do.
The same applies to my plans for the future. I feel the need to be direct, to make plans, to make sure that I have every step figured out.
Why all of this? I'm not sure. Maybe it's because of the work that I've been doing in the kitchen lately, which requires quite a bit of planning and thinking ahead. If I don't know what I need to do before it must be done, or at least part of it, then I might have a harder time working on my tasks than if I'd plan everything well ahead of time.
Maybe being direct and using plan after plan is the best way to achieve your goals while wasting as little time as possible. Or maybe not. But it might be worth trying to use this approach in life for a bit, and see what kind of results I get.