I've learn a few things about this problem over the years: "Wanting to have done something" and "wanting to DO something" are very different. E.g. "I'd like to

I've learn a few things about this problem over the years: "Wanting to have done something" and "wanting to DO something" are very different. E.g. "I'd like to be able to play Claire de Lune on piano", vs the deep work of becoming intimately familiar with every single note and phrase of the piece. The latter necessarily involves getting obsessed for a while; you don't be able to do it if you don't find something deeply stimulating about the specific piano piece. A lot of the things I've "wanted to do" I really just wanted to have done—I wanted to be able to do something, I wanted to know if I was capable of it. But I didn't really want to do it. I didn't really care. I just thought I was capable of all kinds of things and wanted to delight in verifying that. It had a sort of superficiality to it—my reasons for wanting all these things were not compelling enough to drive me to actually do them. (Especially faced with the immediate rewards offered by video games—games and things like that change the "weights" on your internal reward system; you can feel this if you just think about the game, it feels like everything else shifts out of focus and the anticipation of the dopamine prize expands to fill your view.) When you're in school it's relatively easy to do whatever you're told, and it doesn't really matter if you care about it. But accessing this sense of internally-generated energy that can drive you towards things that are important is a completely different skill, and you can't force it. So either: * figure out what you deeply, truly want to DO, and do that (which may be completely different from the things you enjoy imagining HAVING done) * or, think deeply about what you want to "have done", and figure out why it excites you, and focus in on that, activate your curiosity for it, and let that draw you in