Make a choice already!

February 8, 2008

I am one of those persons who is capable of doing almost anything with their lives. I am gifted in many ways.

But that brings other problems. The biggest problem is to decide which of the possible paths to enter. These people usually “taste” something of everything they can do. They can do a lot, but they are expert in nothing.

I have tried so much in my life: web development (which is split up in PHP, Ruby, CMS design and so on), landscaping, computer repair, cooking, running a hosting company, blogging, marketing, consultancy, even shoe repair. The list is a lot longer than this.

Fear

It wasn’t until 2 weeks ago that I realized that I was afraid of picking one thing to do and stick to it. I was afraid that I would miss all the opportunities the other areas would present if I was concentrating on just one.

As a result, the only thing I am really good at is PHP (a scripting language used for web development). But I never really made money with it as I would expect, because I’ve been afraid to research the possibilities. Maybe not only fear, because trying out other things, like Ruby on Rails, took up the time that was supposed to me concentrated on PHP.

Overcoming fear

What I realized is that it’s actually kinda stupid to think that you won’t be able to do other stuff if you concentrate on one field. You just have to learn to concentrate on one thing at a time. When you have achieved your main goals in that field, there is always time to do something else.

Make the decision

After overcoming this fear, you now need to make sure you know exactly what it is you want to concentrate on first. These simple steps helped me to get a better oversight of what it is I want:

• Take a couple of sheets of paper.
• On each sheet you start by writing the title of one specific thing you think you could be doing.
• Write down the steps that you would have to take to bring that opportunity to a success. You can be brief, but going a little deeper in detail can be more helpful in the end.
• Do this for every possible opportunity you have

Maybe it’s advisable to look at the one opportunity that will be the easiest, least time consuming of them all, and pick that one to start off with. This way, you can have a successful business in a lot less time then it would take with the others, which would give you some more time to concentrate on other opportunities.

For me, becoming a chef is the easiest and quickest to do. So right now I’m researching different ways to get into the cooking scene. This doesn’t mean that I already made my decision. I’m still researching some of the other opportunities; who knows if one of them can be more worthwhile on the long run.

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Posted in Personal development