In the past couple of weeks, I've gotten incredibly addicted to Twitter, the micro-blogging, social-networking, chatting, or whatever you want to call it tool that's been a huge hit in the past year or so. I had my account for a while, but never did anything with it. Recently I've just started following people and it's just plain fun to see what these people are doing most of the time. I'm connected all the time now, so feel free to follow me! If you still don't know what Twitter is, see a pretty cool video called Twitter in Plain English.
Well, I'm not here to talk about Twitter, although I've gone on and talked a fair bit about it. This post does have something to do with Twitter. I've been following a lot of people from the Rails community on Twitter (Geoffrey Grosenbach, Obie Fernandez, Dave Thomas, Jamis Buck and Rick Olson, among others). Some of the things they say are funny as hell (such as Obie's "Po-po made me pour out my beer :( "), but for the most part they're interesting stuff from these people. Most recently what I noticed is all the stuff these people actually do. They travel a whole lot, they meet a lot of interesting people and work on a ton of cool stuff.
My first thought when reading these comments are "Damn, these people are lucky to be doing all this stuff." But in reality, I think they didn't get lucky all of a sudden. Well, probably they had a little luck, but nonetheless it's not pure luck. It seems like these people actually worked hard to get where they are now, and are probably still working hard to keep it going.
I always wondered why I couldn't be the one working on awesome stuff, traveling to cool conferences and all that jazz. But making an honest assessment of myself, I definitely don't work hard enough to earn these things. And it's disappointing, because I know that if I put more effort into what I currently do now, I can achieve these things as well. Instead of picking up my Nintendo DS and playing The Legend Of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for one or two hours straight, I could be starting formulating plans for some interesting ideas and projects I have in my mind. Instead of being on IM and chatting about non-significant things with people I don't know in real life, I could be reading a book that will expand my knowledge. Instead of checking my RSS feeds every 20-30 minutes (like I obsessively do sometimes for no apparent reason), I could be helping with an open source project.
These are just a few of the things I can tweak to make more time for these things. I'm seriously going to try to change these things, even if it means less sleep and less playing Zelda - although I can't promise anything when I get my Playstation 2 and Guitar Hero games sent from Puerto Rico, those games are more addicting than heroin. Anyway, I really want to start putting an honest effort to get myself more known out there, to do lots of things that other people will use, and to just help in any way possible those things I enjoy the most.
If you think like I thought before, it's time to take a good look at yourself and see if the problem is that you're truly unlucky, or if the problem lies simply in yourself.