This is a post on, more or less, What Not To Do.

I am an impatient person. It has been forty-five minutes since I kvetched internally that one of my projects was taking too long. I'm also a perfectionist, an achievement junkie, addicted to new ideas and by Blaire Palmer's definition, hypercreative.

Those traits do not play together nicely. 

I love to master new skills. I've added so many strings to my bow over the years I could probably use it as a hammock. And it's not a problem when my learning is externally structured, like a degree. But when I get to set the pace of my learning, difficulties arise. Not difficulties, per se. More like insanity. It goes something like this:

1. I discover <new concept> and think "hey! that's really neat! I want to do something with that!"
2. I look into <new concept> a little learn some basics.
3. An idea forms - a fantastic thing that I could do with <new concept>. It's ambitious, it's out-there, it's probably pushing the edges of what <new concept> can or should do, and no one else is doing it that I can see. It's a great, massive magnum-opus of a project but it'll be awesome if I get it together. (Side note: it's always like this, because to me there's no attraction in creating something that's already there. It feels too much like copying.)
4. I start to teach myself <new concept> by creating <magnum opus> with what I'm learning.
5. Impatience competes with perfectionism and I get irritated that it's taking so long to learn what I need to know to do <magnum opus> properly.
6. I hit some kind of snag or stall, or <newer concept> comes along and I repeat from step 1. Or both.

This is not a productive way to learn, or to create projects. And I still do this, even though I can see and recognise it. The novel that will (in theory) be my debut is not a standalone novel, or even part of a trilogy, but the first in a probably-nine-maybe-twelve-could-be-twenty-book interwoven multi-world, multi-generation multi-main-character series. To paraphrase George R. R. Martin, that's like learning to mountain-climb by scaling Mount Everest. It's frankly idiotic. In my defence, I decided upon this years ago, before I'd recognised this issue, and the sunk-cost fallacy is tying me to the novel as I don't want to "waste" all the hours I've already put into it. (Yes, yes, I know. I know. Let's move on.)

But I am learning, here and there. I started teaching myself interactive fiction programming by creating a small story that didn't matter. (I still shudder at those words.) Having entirely revised my design plans for SubTracker into not only a new programming language but a whole new paradigm, I decided to teach myself what I'd need to know by creating a much smaller piece of software first. This flies in the face of my impatience to have the project done already, and my perfectionism hating to create things that 'don't matter'. It's such an antithesis to my personality that the notion in itself feels like a brilliant new idea.

Hence, probably, my posting about it here.

But it's important to have things to practise on. Projects where you don't have to be worried that a mistake means a missed deadline or hours or work redone - because a mistake can just stay there, a reminder of what you learned. Contrary to what impatient-perfectionism may tell you, it is not a waste of time - it's far more efficient to learn in small controlled stages. Otherwise university degrees would be one giant research project.

Small projects, low pressure. For preference, tailor your project to what you're trying to learn or improve. Don't learn to mountain climb on Everest - it takes much, much longer to see if things aren't working because it's a hard climb, or because you're doing something wrong.

This is not a new idea. But it's one I forget every time a shiny new concept or project comes along that I could create if only I understood more about X...