Préambule

This journal is an attempt to keep my projects, ambitions and goals in line.
As we entered 2024 I started to self reflect a lot on many aspect in my life, and when it comes to frustration, one of the main thing that frustrate me is no finishing my personal project. I have thousands of ideas that never left the state of drawings on a piece of paper and hundreds of project left to be finished. Now that I have less time to mess around with parenting and work, I would like to have the satisfaction of finishing this projects. This series of post are an attempt to keep me on my toes, and motivate me to finish this projects.

I screwed up.

As far as I can remember I’ve always left project undone, or finished enough for them to work as is, but not quite in an optimal shape. The first project I can remember would be dismantling my parents’ old VCR. It was broken and I thought I had the skills to fix it. At maybe 10 years old, I definitely did not had the skills to. But I still tried. Screws after screws, I discovered all the bits and pieces that made a VCR. I found the process exciting, like unwrapping a present. Until I was left with the bare elements. I had no clue what they were for. This circuit board? Probably not important. That motor?Probably not important either.
Maybe if I had some documentation, or had known where to look for to learn more about this things, I would have figured some things out. But all I did was make a mess of my bedroom. In the end I had no idea how to reassemble it, mainly because I blissfully thought to myself I would remember where things go.
In retrospect, I did learned a few things by making some mistakes everybody did before:

1. Identify: For me then, a screw was a screw. The length, head width, threads, didn’t matter to me, they all are screw. Yet when I tried to reassemble the VCR, not all screw went in all the way.
2. Document: Once I realized my mistake that all screws are different and they go in specific holes, I understood that writing down where each of these screws goes would have help the reassembly part.
3. Research: Back then, we didn’t have internet at home. We were too far from civilization to have it. All we had was encyclopedia. Not having information at hand was frustrating. I’m impatient and not being able to fix the problem right here and there just killed the fun of it. If I had ways to understand the components, the way a VCR works and how to repair one, maybe I would have gone further than just dismantling it.

Retrospective

This pas t few years, similar things have happen in my projects except this time, I have the skills to do it for the most part, I have documented my thought process and I have internet to research what I need to learn to finish the project. However the most important distracting factor is that new ideas come while working on a project and I get excited about that new idea, loose interest in the first one I’m working on and focus on the new one. Rinse and repeat and you have a lot of frustration.
Another aspect of it is impatience. I want to get to the next step now. I want it finished as soon as possible and move to the next project. As soon as I hit a roadblock that requires a little extra effort, I tend to give up.
Finally, I tend to be paralyzed by my perfectionism. Whether it’s during a software project, or a woodworking one, i want it to be spotless and perfect. I get into the rabbit hole of perfection, overthinking every aspects of the project, focusing my attention on every flaws of it and I get overwhelm and quit, That, or I wrap things up quickly and call it a day resulting in something I’m not proud of.

Path forward

I don’t have the perfect solution. Like my project so far, I’ve tried different things to finish these project and gave up.
All I can do is try new things, keep myself frustration-free, confident and relaxed and enjoy the process. I want to keep my expectation realistic as well. Not all project I do are achievable - or at least at the moment. I can also put exciting project on the back burner, or use them as a motivation to finish the current project.

All in all, I love when I work on this project. Tinkering, learning new things, getting excited about the results, is what I crave. The results are the cherry on top that I’m chasing now.