Author: Andrea Grassi

Yesterday I was talking to a friend,, once I shared with him my 2015 goals he said that he too wanted to do that many things (I was talking about contributing to opensource and so on) but he just couldn’t make it.
When he got home, he didn’t have the will to do it and he slacked.

I don’t think he really slacked, I’m much more convinced that we have different priorities.
Some priorities are just invisible to us, because we are not able to distinguish “real interest” from “faux interest”.

Real interest is something that drives you deeply, it’s what you think during your day. It’s a motivator of your life.
If you are doing martial arts 3 times a week constantly, you probably have a real interest going on there.

This doesn’t mean that the real interest will last forever. Some times it’s just a mood, some time will just go away in a few weeks.
But for those few weeks it’s on your mind with a big red light that says “Follow me” and your interest is there.

Faux interest can be pictured like something we want to do but that in the end we end up not doing.
It’s the “I’d love to do that, but I’m just too busy”.

I believe there’s some sort of emulation here. We want to emulate success (which, in my modest case I think it’s just “doing a lot of things”) or results.

We are attracted to that idea, and so when we say “I want do build a product, to learn japanese, to learn to dance” what we really mean is “I want to earn lots of money with a successful product, I want to be attractive thanks to my languages, I want to not be embarassed when I’m dancing” and so on.

It’s a subtle trick of our mind.
If we got something we didn’t quite do but we wanted to do so much, maybe it’s time to consider why we care about it and we’re not willing to move a finger for it.

I am an introvert, at least I think so, and one of the things I always found out true about myself is determination.
Which shouldn’t be confused with the fact that I, occasionally, procrastinate as much as anyone out here in the world.

Being an introvert gives you a place to think of, where your time is the most valuable thing.
Introverts, like me, tend to think about the situations to learn from them and act accordingly.

We don’t learn by body, we learn by mind (if this sounds a bit strange, think of it of body memory and mind memory, that’s the idea).
It’s our mind that slowly process information and creates pattern to react instead of learning invisibly by the body.

This is not always a good thing, since we are (at least myself) really slow at learning by body or without thoughts on the matter.

Being an introvert thaught me to value my words, to listen to my mind and to move forward slowly and steadly, knowing that I will get to the point eventually.

If we keep talking and complain, if we keep giving our bad voice a stage we will just continue to let our prejudice grow upon us, to change us.

Many people online believe we are what we do, not only what we say.
But listening to this motto might hide a different issue.

Saying something is doing something.
You chose the words, you chose the context and the people whom you shared the information with.
You took a decision that’s much more deeper than you thought.

Slowly, the single act of repeating something will turn into a bad mantra, an habit that will grow a new beard on you, an invisible beard you can’t recognize.

This beard will define you from here on, it’s your mark, your tatoo.
It’s what you are now.

Giving space to some bad thoughts and prejudice is not just a matter of words, it’s a matter of heart.
What your heart will become next, nobody can know.

Making lists helps defining how we work, it ignites into our brain a pattern to create a map, a defined map of what we are going to do and how we are going to do it.

Let’s take a degree thesis for example.
When you are preparing your thesis you are usually out of ideas, but to me the best advice I’ve ever received on that was “Do the index first”.

I initially wondered, why prepare the index of the thesis beforehand?
It didn’t take long to realize that creating the index laid out all the work I would have done later on.
Thanks to that, writing the thesis was really easy because the most intimidating part was “What should I write?”

So, whenever I need to define what to do I usually write a list, my index, and then move on one step at a time, trying to not change the context.

I do it also in my work.
As a web developer it happens to build an application that’s more complex than usual.
When I need to do that sometimes I can’t visualize entirely the program, so I write small comments, defining what will be the steps, and then I work on the smallest part, building it until it is full fledged, tested, working.

I just love indexes.