Too Much to Learn? Deal With It

It's Monday and I'm me; there is not much else for it than to write a 'Me on Monday' post! After well over a month of eerie silence and wasted opportunities, I'm back for good this time and hopefully the coming weeks and months are going to prove fruitful on the blogging front. Today's post is regarding something that niggles away at me almost every single day of my life. It's a problem that I'm sure I'm not alone with and one that is probably most overt in our teenage years. The problem that I'm talking about is 'choosing' what you are going to learn. Obviously we don't get the choice with a lot of things (we're told what to learn at school and that is that) but then there are those extra-curricular things - the things that make us who we are. Now I've written much on this topic in the past including this post which in which I list the things that I want to learn to do - safe to say that not much of it has been learned in the 6 months since I wrote it. It's not even a case of me not wanting to (of course I do) but when I think about all of the things that I want to do with my spare time I get bogged down and end up doing nothing. This is not the wisest way forward and I'll never learn anything new at this rate. Hopefully this post might help to remedy the situation.

I'm not going to go through all of the things that I would love to learn and do with my spare time but the basics are to learn a musical instrument, read more (mainly non-fiction stuff), write more (away from this blog) and all of the other things that these things will teach me. They are such generic things as well and the problem is that when you open each of them up (particularly the reading and writing) there are so many possibilities to cope with and so many choices to be made and it is here that my problem lies: I just can't choose! I've got a reading list as long as my arm on which most of the books are only about 10 seconds away from me just now, yet I'm not doing anything about it. It's the same with the writing thing: I come up with so many ideas that I just can't decide what to run with and then I end up not doing anything about it which is nonsensical considering the commitment that I put into blogging. Welcome to the indecisive side of me!

So what is the answer to this good, yet troublesome, problem? Well it comes in the simple form of just going for something. I spend far too much time thinking about what to do with my free time that I end up never getting anything done. The simple answer is just deal with the problem by making a decision. I've got a longer than long summer ahead of me and, even though I always create elaborate plans in my head about the things that I could do, I'm not going to get anything done if I spend all of my time deciding what to learn or deciding what to read. More often than not I just end up picking up my PSP and I end up playing that for most of the day and before I know where I am it's night and I've once again done nothing with my day. I'm going to try and make this summer different because last year, which was slightly shorter but still a long holiday, I really did nothing - I didn't even do any preparatory work for university. So here is the plan: I'm going to make an achievable list of things to do this summer and then if I get that done then the chances are that I'll have learned quite a lot and I'll feel good about the fact that I can throw a finished list in the bin at the end of it all. Instead of pining after new things to learn, I'm going to spend my time on things that I already know about and try to learn more about them - I might as well even get a head start on my 2nd year at university, shock-horror!

The simple message that I'm going for here is that instead of burdening yourself with unachievable goals for bettering yourself, pick a handful of stuff and ride them. Even if you can't decide a ranking for these things, just go for a selection and the chances are that you'll come out with a few great things at the end of it. In a summer where I'll probably drink more than I should and spend more time in bed than I need, I really want to come out of the other end with some good solid knowledge under my belt. That, my friends, will be for me, a successful summer!

Thanks for reading,

Martin