Summer starts June 21st. I call bullshit, summer starts now. It's hot, humid, and a healthy coating of Lacadaise (tm) has settled in, immune to cleansing/organizing efforts. I can see it now - a huge list of summer projects swimming in my mind like fish, waiting to be fed with idea flakes or whole concept carcasses depending on their scale and ambition. Time to sack up and swim in this bitch.
The summer project is an ancient form of torture, passed down from generation to generation with the best of intentions. The problem is compound; there is the feeling of freedom associated with summer from childhood experience, mixed with the idea of the satisfaction from execution, sprinkled with the notion that a difficult path to success yields the most self-improvement. The reality is simple; there isn't actually more time to complete anything than there was before, and the glory of a project's end is enough to obscure just how fucked up and difficult the project will actually be. That being said, as humans we make these outlandish promises to ourselves and eventually have to pick up the pieces of our own shattered egos. Bleak, but true.
This is my approach to the summer project - never commit. It's defeatist, and without committing there's no assurance that progress will ever be made. But the truth is that committing to a summer project and not finishing it is just as damaging as saying you will get around to it and watching your ambitions float away on the sea of time. In the end, your self-confidence is either unphased or scarred, but never boosted from the failed effort.
This does all assume you will fail. While this is a reasonable assumption because of the over-exaggeration of one's abilities to which we are all prone, sometimes we really outshine ourselves. In this case, there is another, more elegant path. Aim low. That way, failure costs nearly nothing, and success, for some strange reason, tends to be wildly more impactful than it's less fortunate counterpart. Small successes lead to big gains, and you may even experience the sought-after snowball effect. Stock market, why can't we all play by the same rules?
So now, honesty time. Here is a list of my summer goals and the reasonableness of the effort. Maybe even a few suggestions to myself thrown in for good measure.
1. Learn the guitar
Evaluation: Hah. To be fair, I've already started learning and I'm making progress. I can even play songs. But the scope of this project is just too great, and most people experience this one over a lifetime anyways.
Alternative: Focus on a few songs, a finger technique or two, and some smoothing out those chord transitions. Baby steps.
2. Build a bamboo bike
Evaluation: Oh man, this one is waaay too lofty. It also has the double whammy of being expensive. That being said, of all the mad scientist projects I've ever promised myself I would do, this is the most likely because of its practicality. Still, considering it's basically an eight week endeavor, it's probably not likely to finish.
Alternative: Design the frame and a jig in Solidworks and shelve it for a time when money is more available. Trick out my current bike. Both would provide distraction.
3. Build new computer
Evaluation: Easy, but the cost argument applies double here. I would also be providing myself with a more powerful version of the major source of most of my distraction from project efforts. Double edged sword.
Alternative: Burn my computer. Become productive.
There are more projects, but maybe I'll talk about them at a later date. This post is long already.
Peas.
-Dt
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