I think a lot of people are stuck in the same loop as me. I’m the tomorrow guy. I always believe I have the time, the energy, and the potential to do something big.
Every project starts like a new game. The first chapter is easy. I plan the start, and I tell myself I’ll figure out the rest once I’m going, but I never get far enough to learn anything. I don’t even have a pile of failures, because I never made the decisions that would have made them. I have a pile of restarts, and none of them have gone far enough. The latest is this website, flatmiles.com.

The weekends go the same way. Anime, movies, scrolling. It’s easier to escape than to think about the projects, and the stakes are low: just my time, which I had loads of as a kid, and some planning that runs only on imagination and dreams. I know I have it easier than most. I’m a spoiled kid in Thailand.

This habit goes back further than my projects. When I was a kid, my brothers played Ragnarok Online, and I wanted in. I made a character and leveled up by following my brother’s guide, step by step. I didn’t understand the game well enough to try my own way, and I was scared that if I did, I’d f****d the character up. So I kept asking for the route, asking for the right choice at every step. I still catch myself doing it: telling someone about a master plan full of dreams before I start, waiting to hear if it’s a good idea. Kids do that. Adults doing it is a different story.

My last major restart was a salad farm. I spent about six months on it. I was planning, learning how to grow salad, planting it, filming the progress, trying to cut operating costs, planning social media, editing video, taking photos, and editing them in Lightroom. I quit my first job to do it, so I had no income and no buffer (my own, not the family’s). It was too much at once, and I didn’t know which part to start with. I didn’t stop because the salad failed. I stopped because I was overwhelmed and never got to the part where I’d have learned something real.

I also have to be honest about the advantages. My parents are comfortable, and they don’t need anything from me. As the youngest, I don’t carry the family responsibilities that fall to a son, because my two older brothers handle them. That’s real help, and I’m grateful for it.

So I’m in about the best position anyone could be in to go all in on the thing I want to do. Why am I still stuck? I think the fight is mostly in my head. I hold every idea too long, weigh what each one costs, and plan my escape before I’ve started. That makes it easier to escape than to fight my way through.

I’m not writing this to say I’ve fixed the restarting habit. I think of each restart as a new patch in an MMORPG, where the level cap goes up, even if you start again from level one. Each restart is a little further than the last, even if it doesn’t look like that from outside. Building this site and writing this down is one of those patches.

I don’t know where this goes. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t expect something from this. I’m happy to keep restarting for now, and maybe one day my level cap will be high enough that I won’t need to restart again.