You can’t do everything at once.

I’ve spent great portions of my life wrestling with this notion. I actually wanted to be a doctor once. It might’ve been the only career I was ever set on and I screwed the pooch because of my inability to knuckle down and not attempt everything all the time. That was one of my ugliest personal failures, but hey ho, you learn and move on.

Having killed off the only thing I ever wanted to be then left me in the position of having to search for a new calling in life. A new purpose, or at least new interests (first world problems). But choosing to go down any particular path felt like I was burning every other imaginary branch. Because in many ways you are.

I remember my brother pointing out that by refusing to pick a path and stalling, I was also burning whatever my actual real tangible outcome would end up being and not just hypothetical branch-realities. No choice was a choice in itself. In my head all possibilities were of equal merit and consideration, but obviously whatever ended up coming-to-be was of greater importance than all the shoulda-woulda-coulda’s combined (for those that care, I think this is the primest Ne vs Ni example ever). I couldn’t physically do it all once.

I can’t be all those people. I can’t live everywhere. I can’t eat all the food or meet everyone. I can’t physically do everything.

I slowly made my peace with that, for the better. And it strangely opened me up to doing largely what I want a lot of the time. 80/20 and all that.

This year I think I’ve come to make my peace now with the mental side of the same concept: that I have limited mental bandwidth with which to operate. I can’t think all the things at once. I can’t decompress, gestate a novel, formulate business plans, study economics, review martial arts concepts, and watch movies in the same down time. Those all require RAM.

If I want to make decent headway with making money, I have to spent quality time doing deep work on it. That is time I must take away from writing, and thinking about writing, and martial arts and thinking about martial arts. I have to restrict what topics I spend my thoughts on at any one time.

Yeah, no shit, Captain Obvious.

Gotta pick. You can’t have it all.