I can relate to this. A friend once described me as a vector with infinite magnitude and randomly changing direction. At various points in life I have occupied myself with studying everything from Biology and functional programming to Indian Philosophy and Sanskrit. But I never stick to any one project for long. A few months into my study program, I shift to the next shiny thing that catches my attention.
There is a saving grace though: the set of things that I'm interested in remains constant, so that I am not endlessly moving into newer and newer areas, but cycling between a fixed set of subjects. Right now I have come back to functional programming and doing courses from Coursera. I am at the moment quite determined to see this through, but knowing myself as well as I do, I fully expect to jump to something else in a couple of month's time.
My current strategy to tackle this syndrome is as follows:
* Accept that you are interested in multiple subjects and that you may never be a world-class expert in any of them. However, you can be a competent generalist who has sufficient familiarity with a bunch of fields and this can be valuable. It's also a probably more interesting way to lead your life than specializing in one field.
* Keep a journal of your learning activities so that you can learn more about yourself over time. I have been writing every day since 2010 and its fascinating when I look back at what I was doing this time of the year a few years back.
* When you start a study project, focus on short sprints instead of the long marathon. Try to accumulate concrete achievements and most importantly, aim for a closure to your sprint. For example, if you start a book, declare victory once you have studied 80% of the chapters. If you start on a Mathematical topic, upload your notes and problems you solve somewhere where you can look them up later, and declare your sprint complete once you have dome some 100-120 non-routine problems.
* Realize that your effort is not completely wasted. I first flirted with Haskell in November 2012 but later dropped it and moved on to something else. The next time I took up Haskell again was about a year later in November 2013. I had forgotten most of what I had learned, BUT the second time it was much, much easier to cover the same ground again and I went further in my learning that time. Ditto for Sanskrit. I first tried to learn Sanskrit in August 2013, but later dropped out of my study program. The next time I took it up was in June 2014, and I stuck with it long enough to complete the first part of a correspondence course - a concrete achievement!
I am still struggling with the random-vector syndrome, but I am much better at coping with it. I "know" that the solution is to focus on just one thing, but that strikes me as a supremely uninteresting way to lead my life.
There is a saving grace though: the set of things that I'm interested in remains constant, so that I am not endlessly moving into newer and newer areas, but cycling between a fixed set of subjects. Right now I have come back to functional programming and doing courses from Coursera. I am at the moment quite determined to see this through, but knowing myself as well as I do, I fully expect to jump to something else in a couple of month's time.
My current strategy to tackle this syndrome is as follows:
* Accept that you are interested in multiple subjects and that you may never be a world-class expert in any of them. However, you can be a competent generalist who has sufficient familiarity with a bunch of fields and this can be valuable. It's also a probably more interesting way to lead your life than specializing in one field.
* Keep a journal of your learning activities so that you can learn more about yourself over time. I have been writing every day since 2010 and its fascinating when I look back at what I was doing this time of the year a few years back.
* When you start a study project, focus on short sprints instead of the long marathon. Try to accumulate concrete achievements and most importantly, aim for a closure to your sprint. For example, if you start a book, declare victory once you have studied 80% of the chapters. If you start on a Mathematical topic, upload your notes and problems you solve somewhere where you can look them up later, and declare your sprint complete once you have dome some 100-120 non-routine problems.
* Realize that your effort is not completely wasted. I first flirted with Haskell in November 2012 but later dropped it and moved on to something else. The next time I took up Haskell again was about a year later in November 2013. I had forgotten most of what I had learned, BUT the second time it was much, much easier to cover the same ground again and I went further in my learning that time. Ditto for Sanskrit. I first tried to learn Sanskrit in August 2013, but later dropped out of my study program. The next time I took it up was in June 2014, and I stuck with it long enough to complete the first part of a correspondence course - a concrete achievement!
I am still struggling with the random-vector syndrome, but I am much better at coping with it. I "know" that the solution is to focus on just one thing, but that strikes me as a supremely uninteresting way to lead my life.