This might be the best time of your life
The world stands still, everything is slowing down. You might have the chance to breathe. You might be thrown into chaos. Covid-19 is changing the world as we know it, at least for the next couple of months. Many people are negatively impacted by it, others are helping out which is something I admire deeply. However, if you can count yourself among those feeling ‘bored’ right now, I have a great suggestion for you. Use the time. Use it to your advantage and invest in the aspects of yourself that you wanted to put resources into for so long. There will not be a better time than now. When all of this is over, you don’t want to look back and realize that you hit the pause button for 3–4 months and are at the same exact level you started at. If you do, that is fine. No judgment from me. But if you feel restless, if you want to take the next step and don’t want this to stop you, consider the text below.
When I finished college a couple of years ago I started one of the best projects of my entire life. I called it ‘Following my own curriculum’. The basic premise was that I had the perfect opportunity to carve out time for myself to do the things I have always wanted to do.
For me, this was mostly about getting to know myself better, especially when I am not surrounded by people I know, and to learn additional skills that I had not put any or too few resources in for the past couple of years. I started to aggregate a list of skills I wanted to master and topics I wanted to learn more about and spent a lot of time figuring out which courses I needed to take, which books I needed to read and which exercises I needed to practice to do exactly that. This is how my curriculum was born. You can think of it as a close resemblance to a college curriculum outlining the learning objectives and lectures of how to get there. Based on this list of resources and goals, I designed a 6-month plan that included everything from learning how to build a neural network from scratch to reading up on the classics in the fields of science and philosophy. My routine also included setting up and experimenting with different habits like eating once a day, spending a full week reading(I finished 8 out of the 10 books that I wanted to finish) or simply writing a detailed journal every morning and evening about my feelings and thoughts.
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. the second best time is today — Proverb
How can this help you? I am not suggesting that you should follow my footsteps. I suggest you find your own project that uniquely fits into figuring out who you want to become and expanding your areas of future growth. Some of you have the gift of a long stretch of unstructured time ahead of you. Do not let the time slip by and watch the paint dry while you wait. Come out of this stronger than you got in. You might look back at this time, despite all the turbulence and uncertainty, as a time that formed your understanding of self and brought you closer to who you want to be. In the end, it doesn’t matter if you do what I suggested above or if you start building the startup you have always dreamed of. The core of my message is: What’s stopping you from starting today?
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You can read in more detail about my own curriculum in an old medium post of mine here. Also, I first thought about including specific examples of things you could learn and resources where you could do so into the text but decided to keep it vague other than mentioning my own example so that you have the freedom to pursue what you really want. I cannot possibly know what it is. If you want more inspiration of practices I think are helpful or resources that could help you out, feel free to let me know and I will write a follow-up to this. I have adapted my thinking a bit and have identified a couple of projects I wished I had added in my journey back then.
