I am not yet an immensely successful, but I intend to be. I’m not rich, but I intend to be. I’m not famous and I don’t really care if I am, but I suppose it comes with success. I’m young enough to manage those things. What I need to do in order to become all that is work. A lot of hard work. For now the work would mostly be in the area of learning things, but it still needs to be done. By me. I think I’m not doing enough now.

There are tons of advice out there about how to become successful, happy and other things. And there is enough of advice about getting work done too. The tricky part is to pick the one that helps you. I mean for me the tricky part is to find the one that helps me. I have problems getting work done. Especially if I get my hands on an interesting fantasy or science fiction book. There are a few categories of work I have problems getting done, that I’ll try to describe.

It took me quite a long time to begin a proper blog, because I wanted to write one only when I was ready for posting regular meaningful entries. Like I was ever going to be if I didn’t actually start writing them. Of course “to learn to write blog entries” is not motivating enough to write something. I think this could be called “perfection syndrome”.

When I try learning something new, I sometimes don’t do more practising after the first few attempts. I hate the thought of doing the thing so clumsily again. This happens when I’m trying to learn musical instruments or programming. It is the silliest reason ever. Of course I suck at doing something I’m learning to do, but I can’t learn to do it better if I don’t practise. But I just want to be good all the time. “Perfection syndrome” again, only in a more bizarre form?

And last but not least are the things I’m not bad at, but I am afraid of getting stuck at. There might appear some kind of problem, like some calculations wouldn’t match or I wouldn’t know how to describe some results, so I don’t want to even begin. Mostly these are school exercises. Today I spent all day not doing my physics homework. And since it was what I was supposed to be doing, I wasn’t doing anything else useful either. The ridiculous part is that those problems can be overcome, but they take a while and more work.

It is said that realising the problem is already a step towards the solution, so I hope I have pinned the right problem. I am too frightened to fail or even to not be perfect, to do as well as I’m capable of doing. I must overcome my fear of failure and fail more often, work harder to learn more and therefore succeed more in the future.