Your curiosity is your fuel

I thought it might be fun to make a few posts that give the back story to some YouTube shorts I’ve made recently, add context and maybe drive the message home a little.

Today I posted a new one about being driven by curiosity and having patience with yourself. A very short short:

A large part of my life has been spent paralyzed by worries of failure and being overwhelmed by the difficulty of some of what I’ve wanted to achieve in life.

The people I admired most in my teens and early twenties almost felt like a different species to me. I never thought of myself as a capable person and on top of that, not very much came easy to me.

I could hardly remember a few words of Spanish for a test, and while I wasn’t horrible at music or sports, neither came as naturally for me as they did for some of my peers.

I never actually imagined it was possible for me to reach proficiency in anything.

And so I put off learning guitar and learning languages seriously until I was 19.

Something happened that year. I had a breakup and it got me beating myself up about how little I had achieved in 19 years and so I decided that I would spend a majority of my free time getting better at the things I liked.

I bought a guitar and a Japanese textbook. Language felt easier because I was still horrified imagining myself standing on stage and so I grinded away for 3 years to gain a sloppy level of fluency and eventually moved to Japan.

Guitar came much slower but I pushed myself to practice enough that I could start writing my own songs.

A lot happened. It was hard for me to balance work with all the things I should have been learning since I was 12, and so I left society for a while to drift around and learn how to go with the flow.

I became fluent in Mandarin in 6 months. I wrote my first novel. I wrote a bunch of songs and toured around Asia. It felt as if I could achieve 10x more with half the effort. My dreams started to feel like real possibilities.

It turns out that effort was not what was needed. Curiosity and excitement was the answer, and getting used to channeling those things into action. I didn’t set anymore deadlines for myself. I made lists of small tasks and did the one that felt the most exciting for me every single day, multiple times a day.

Every day I ask myself what would excite me the most and the. I get myself pumped thinking about it.

There was still some resistance due to old fear and insecurity, so I started by pushing myself through the first 2-3 minutes and found that most of these tasks were fun and easy for me to focus on for hours at a time.

If something wasn’t fun after the first 5 minutes I was free to change what I was doing to something that would be more enjoyable. But I rarely had to. Just having the option to stop let me focus much better because these were things that I truly wanted to do.

When I was learning Japanese or guitar at first I could never focus like that because I had made strict schedules for myself and everything felt like work. When I turned it all into play, I became addicted and every minute I spent on whatever I was doing became exponentially more effective.

Eventually, I could write and edit two 12 page chapters, put out a blog post every day, study 100 words in another language, make a YouTube video and prepare for a concert all in the same week.

None of it felt difficult.

So I urge you to put aside the desire to push yourself and just focus on trying to find excitement for whatever it is you want to achieve, then channel that excitement into actual work.

I suppose I’ll have to share more about what that process looks like in the future!

Let me know what you want to focus your energy on and what makes you excited! If you do it in the comment of my YouTube short as well, you’ll get an extra upvote!!

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