Ten years ago, I came across one of my favorite adages - if you commit to nothing, you’ll be distracted by everything. Back then, I was hyper-focused, hyper-committed, hyper-disciplined, and hyper-productive.
Fast forward to April 2023, things have changed. Although I’m interested in starting everything, I lack the commitment to finish anything. Here’s an example of what happened today:
I had scheduled 30 minutes for studying Thai and gathered my study materials - two boxes of flashcards for vowels and consonants. The consonant card box had instructions on memorablethai.com, while the vowel box had a video memory system on howtolearnthai.com.
Unfortunately, howtolearnthai.com was no longer available, and memorablethai.com redirected to lannainnovation.com.
After some searching, I found the Innovative Video Memory System on YouTube in the form of playlists. However, this was the second time the support materials were unavailable to me. So, I decided to download the YouTube videos to my laptop.
While attempting to download the 34 videos, I faced several issues with different websites. Some could only download a video at a time, while others downloaded the video at ridiculously slow speeds. Eventually, I found the Pytube Python library, which helped me accomplish my goal.
I considered creating a Ruby equivalent. This led me to read about the YouTube API, but before I knew it, I was writing this blog post about my experience. My mind had hopped from one interest to another, and I never got around to learning Thai.
I worked on this blog post for an hour, and although I didn’t learn Thai, I made progress towards my blogging goal.