A creative but chopped-up centipede alien

I never finishing anything.

Learning to code came with mind numbing difficulty for me. I didn’t have the right kind of mindset or focus, I bashed my head against it (and the google search bar) and now I’ve actually become quite efficient and know some slightly more advanced things. But after all this work, all this learning, all this head bashing, it feels like I barely have anything to show for it. Even though I know I could do so much now.

After a certain amount of time it hurts to sit on potential and to not have anything to show for it. It’s just wasting away.

There’s a part in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 that always stuck with me.

In it he describes a race of aliens who don’t experience time the same way as we do, they experience it all at once. They perceive themselves as long centipedes, stretching from the point of their birth, to the point of their death. A dotted line with every version of themselves, blurred together into one. They experience every single moment of their entire lives at once.

I always thought that sounded lovely, to be so connected and in tune with every version of myself. It’s impossible to exist in every moment of my life at once, but I believe that through making stuff, my past, present and future selves can communicate and connect.

I’d like to be a long, continuous centipede like that. But instead I’m a centipede with big missing chunks. Because I hardly ever finish any projects.

At first I thought “I haven’t put in enough time to finish stuff yet.” But that’s not true. I’ve spent hundreds of hours on projects that I’ve abandoned. Lack of work is not the issue, it’s something else. Then I found this great definition of what a project is…

My definition of a project is “any undertaking that cannot be completed in a single ‘sitting’.” If you can complete it in one sitting, that’s not a project. That’s a task, or a simple set of tasks.

A project has to be something that requires that you collaborate, either with others, or even “only” with your future self.

I’ve found that a lack of empathy towards my future, present and past selves is the real issue. This is how it usually plays out for me on any project.

• Present Jonas spends time going in a direction, even though he knows it will result in more work than an alternative path.

• Future Jonas is unhappy about the amount of work that’s been handed to him. So he simplifies things.

• Past Jonas’ time has been wasted.

This keeps happening just because I feel like I need to explore every possibility of what this thing could be. I do stuff like that even when I intend to make something simple and barebones. Luckily the fix is pretty simple, I just need to make sure present Jonas thinks about future Jonas. Easier said than done though.

The best way to do that is to lower my standards.

Recently I changed my profile picture on twitter to my avatar from Surmount. I had no intention of making a deal out of it. Right after changing my picture I thought “hey, I might as well tweet it.” So I wrote the first thing that came to mind and shared it.

That’s not a lot of interaction on a bigger scale, but that’s above average for something that I share. If I had wanted for this tweet to go big I would have tried way harder to formulate something longer, like “look I made myself in the character editor of my game Surmount, you can change your face and clothes and bla bla bla.” Which seems pretty dry by comparison. I only discovered how compelling something as short and casual as “new mii” could be because I lowered my bar so much that I didn’t care.

A reader shared a relevant anecdote with me in response to a recent issue of Indie Notebook, where I talked about this.

“This reminds me of a concept in life drawing in which whenever the model strikes a longer pose (say, 20 minutes), instead of doing a single long drawing you do 20 shitty 1 minute ones. The 20th 1 minute drawing will usually be as good, if not better than the single longer one you would’ve done otherwise, and you've learned so much more than you would’ve otherwise.”

It’s a good reminder to give up on perfectionism, that obsessing about the details isn’t gonna fix the fundamental issues. In order to improve something, I could go over it with my eraser and correct it. But I’m unlikely to find what actually sticks if I make assumptions about it in my head before I test it in the real world first.

That perfectionism-energy could be better spent on working on what’s next instead.

I tried too hard too soon.

I learned to code by attempting to make way too advanced games way too soon (one of my earliest games were a combination of Zelda BOTW, Mario Odyssey and GTA). And I’ve been stuck in this pattern ever since. Just now I’m starting to break out of it. Looking back, I’m sure I would’ve learned much faster if I had just banged out lots of crappy little games instead. And I would’ve had something to show for it.

There are ideas that I have to go all in for and bet years on them in order to do them justice. But not every single idea I ever have can be of that scale, because honestly I will only have time for a few grandiose projects in my life.

I don’t want to make a few things, I want to create a large body of work. Kinda like that centipede of aliens. But to do that I gotta learn how to collaborate better with all these different versions of myself that are scattered throughout time.

I’m gonna try to get every idea out of my system in some form, even if I don’t think much of them at the time. Because apparently I can be a pretty poor judge of which thoughts are crap and which are not.

New mii.