When curiosity gets in the way
If you know me, you probably know that I’m a huge overthinker. Seriously, not that long ago I could spend an unreasonable amount of time deliberately thinking about which socks I should wear.
You probably also know that I have a passion for building and learning, especially when it comes to software and AI.
Over the past few months, these two things haven’t been the best combination. I’ve been struggling with the sheer number of things I want to build or learn. I constantly find myself surrounded by ideas, projects, papers, technologies, and topics that seem genuinely interesting and worth exploring.
But there is a problem: you can only take on so much at once. Building something that you understand in detail, trust and control takes time. Developing deep knowledge of a topic takes a lot of time too. AI can help enormously with both nowadays, but I don’t think this fundamental fact has changed or will ever (but that’s just my opinion 🙂)
And, at least for me, multitasking doesn’t lead to deep understanding. I enjoy having my attention focused on one, or at most two, projects. Whenever I split that attention across five different things, I might technically be doing more, but I don’t feel like I’m really learning any of them. More importantly, I stop enjoying the process (which is the ultimate reason why I do it). The funny thing is that the more projects I started, the less I finished.
It becomes a spiral. Before you’ve finished one project, you’ve already discovered three new ideas that seem even more exciting. So you start exploring those. And before you finish them, something else catches your attention. It’s like the equivalent of doom scrolling for geeks. There will always be another interesting paper to read, another framework to try, another project to build, another thing worth learning.
So I’ve been trying to internalize a piece of advice that my smart girlfriend has been baking into my brain:
“You can have everything, just not at once.”
I think that’s especially important for people who are naturally curious.
You don’t need to stop having ideas. You don’t need to stop being curious. You just need to decide what matters to you right now and prioritize accordingly. Once you do that, you start realizing that many of the things that feel urgent or exciting are actually just noise relative to your current goals.
That doesn’t mean deleting the noise. Write the idea down. Save the paper. Bookmark the project. It will still be there.
Just explore it when it’s actually the right time to do so.
Jose