This little quote is a short phase a friend told me one time (okay, it was his yearbook quote, but it’s practically the same). Over time, I realized it had more pertenance to my life than I had previously thought.

Over the years, I have often find myself with some new burning interest I was willing to comit myself entirely to. About a month later, I would realize that I never really wanted to go through all that hastle in the first place, it was just kind of a temporary thing. Even though I’ve caught myself doing this countless times, I still continue to do it to this day. One recent example would be these movie projects I keep mumbling about. I really wanted to make movies, but now I wonder where all that motivation came from. Then when I look around, I see the same thing happening to other people and their projects. Most people don’t even get out of the talking about doing it phases. Turning back to my life, I realize that I once went on one of these flights of fancy, but it turned out slightly different. The similarity of the rest of my little flings is that it never materialized into anything, but the difference is that I never gave up. I have now been developing amateur video games for 6 years now. Setting goals for myself has gone a long way towards keeping me involved in my little projects, but it obviously isn’t enough to get the projects completed. What am I missing that could make me pursue these projects with enough intensity to complete them? What reason do I have to continue when I have a lifetime of work ahead of me before I can reach any point that can be useful? Why do I devote so much of my life to something that, so far, hasn’t yielded any results? If I continue, will it ever yield results? Most of the time, when I work on my game, I don’t want to. I feel like it would be so easy just to do something fun or immediate. I can make an analogy to trying to stay awake after I’ve already been awake for 40 hours: it seems so easy and gratifying to just lay your head down and give up. You know you had reasons for staying up, but at this point, you are so tired that those reasons are fuzzy and faded. Another analogy that comes to mind is distance running. Often distance runners pick a milestone that they can see, and make it their temporary goal just to run until they get to that marker. When they reach that marker, they set a new one and keep going. Setting goals for myself is very similar in concept to this. The unfortunate difference is that I don’t know my eventual destination, I don’t know how far away it is, and I certainly don’t know the path. I don’t even know which direction to run. The only thing that I do know is that the only way I can avoid guaranteed failure is to run. So I run, slow and blind, forever.