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Fear, Failure, Willpower, and Focus

My job. My wife and baby. My volunteering at the church. My management of two blogs. My graphic design. My personal development via books and online courses. My upkeep of stuff around the house. My sleep. My exercise routine. My eating habits. My "fun" life.

My sanity.

My life has gotten a little bit out of control lately, so I'm taking an intentional step back now to see what went "wrong" and re-orient where I'm going. My hope is that you can learn from my mistakes, so I'm segmenting this post around 4 central themes: fear, failure, willpower, and focus. Let's get into it.

FEAR

 I'm 27.5 years old, and I make that ".5" distinction for a reason. I don't know why, but I became hyper-aware recently that I'm edging closer and closer to that 30 year old mark. As I look back across my 20s, I feel that I wasted a good chunk of the past decade. It's only been within the last year or so that I truly began to evolve myself into something that I can be proud of...

 But I still feel like it's not enough.

 I have this profound fear that if I don't do something by the time I turn 30, then my life is a failure. I can't help but compare myself to my role models like Seth Godin, Ramit Sethi, and Tim Ferriss who all accomplished great things before they turned 30 years old. That fear has pushed me harder and harder and harder. I am well aware that there are some people who don't find "success" until later in life, but I can't help but see time as this thing that's slipping away from me quickly.

 Just looking at pictures of my daughter from 3 months ago to now, I am dumbfounded how much she has changed. Her growth is a real, tangible example of just how much things can change in a short amount of time. It has driven me to evolve myself exponentially in the same manner.

 FAILURE

 Here's the rough timeline of what the last 8 or so months have looked like. Keep in mind that with the exception of the first bullet, all these things are piling on top of each other and essentially exponentially compounding themselves.

  • August 2016: I finished my Master's degree.
  • August 2016: I started this blog with just a very narrow focus in mind.
  • August 2016: I started learning graphic design in Adobe Illustrator.
  • September 2016: Where this blog started small, it grew more and more with "series" of posts.
  • October 2016: I wanted a means to showcase my graphic design, so I started a second blog with its own "series" of posts.
  • December 2016: I started my current job.
  • December 2016: My daughter was born.
  • March 2016: My work in my current role increases. (Not a bad thing at all, but it's using a lot more brainpower than I expected.)
  • April 2016: I start two major online courses to increase my skill and proficiency.
So, trying to balance all this on top of each other has led to...
  • May 2016: The great crash of David's brain.
Knowing that I have to keep things like my regular work and family a priority, I have knowingly let other things slip like the upkeep of both blogs, stuff done around the house, continuing to build my graphic design skills, and more.

I have bitten off way more than I can chew.

WILLPOWER

In my studies from folks like Mindless Eating's Brian Wansink and Switch's Heath brothers, they talk a lot about willpower, specifically about how willpower is a pretty awful thing to rely on. Without the right incentives and triggers for success in place, running on willpower alone fails pretty quickly.

For a while, it was pretty easy for me to sustain everything because I genuinely found a lot of it fun. (Apparently I have a weird, twisted understanding of what "fun" is.) But as more things got added on, those pleasure / success triggers started to fail and started resorting toward pure willpower. The will to post 3-5 posts a week, the will to sustain healthy eating habits, the will to complete those online courses. All started crashing.

Wansink and the Heath brothers have it right: willpower was only sustainable for so long.

FOCUS

What's this all mean for me now? I'm going to be making some changes. Some easy ones, some not-so-easy ones.

So instead of beginning with what I'll be cutting out, I want to say that I'm taking the approach of a deeper focus on things. This understanding of deeper focus helps me to understand what things I do that support this and the things I do that don't support that.

That said: I'll be focusing on two broad topics: personal development and graphic design.

It'll manifest itself in the following ways:
  • I'll be collapsing my two blogs into one. Because I really want a fresh start, I'm not going have one blog absorb the other but rather create an entirely new blog. It'll simply be called @dkhundley and will be found behind the www.dkhundley.com URL. I have grandiose visions for how I would like it to look, but that will take me a long time to get there. For the short term agile-like "minimal viable product," I'll just be creating a new Blogger-based site and using Behance to feature my graphic design. That new site will be live in a few days.
  • I'm significantly cutting down blog content. No more book reviews, Adulting 101 posts, video game reviews, music reviews, and more. I also am purposefully not committing to putting out X number of posts per week. At most, I won't do more than 3 posts per week, and that is definitely a max number.
  • I'm backing out of one of my online courses. This was definitely the hardest decision. I'm not going to say what the course was, but it was one that cost a lot and showed a lot of promise. It was honestly a great course, but I struggled a lot throughout. Because the course had a money-back guarantee, I very shamefully exercised that option. It was painful and frankly embarrassing to ask for my money back because I was definitely the failure, not the course itself. (Ugh... It still makes me sick just thinking about it.)
  • My personal development efforts will definitely focus more on graphic design. Whereas I spent a lot of time reading a lot of books about business, I'm setting my sights on truly refining my graphic design proficiency. I'm not cutting out business books entirely, but they will significantly be cut down.
I know that might not sound like a lot, but trust me: it is. The diversity of content alone has been so unmanageable lately that it has prevented me from writing posts around personal development and graphic design, even though I have topics thought out for those posts. I just couldn't bring myself to write them because I felt the need to continue to diversify content, so the focused topics were shelved. That was a bad idea.

Like I said, these decisions weren't easy to make, but I'm already feeling a huge wave of relief for having made them. Notice one thing: refining focus is NOT the same as purely cutting out things. It's not as if I'm going to be sitting on the couch watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians now. (Well... not all the time.) I'm still going to be working hard; it'll just be working hard in a more focused direction. I hope you learned something from my mistakes. I'm glad I didn't go too far down the road of juggling all these things, but I still wish I would have never had to go through with them at all.
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