Lazy Ambitious or Overthinking?

This thought has been churning in my head for quite a while, but it got triggered again by this one article i was reading about being “lazy ambitious”. it was about how that person had lots of ideas and dreams but wasn’t doing anything about it. although, i’m not sure if that is solely attributed to being lazy, but lets for the sake of argument, call it that. After reading that, a bulb went off in my head screaming “HARD RELATE, HARD RELATE!!!”, because i feel like i do that a lot too. I have so many dreams about becoming a researcher, working in cutting edge AI Interpretability, but so many times i end up being lazy about lots of banal stuff and starts procrastinating.

In past couple of years, my way of thinking has taken a turn for bad i feel, where i feel, anything that doesn’t sound interesting to do, or requires any brain power, or a solution is known is not worth doing and I’m wasting my time in doing that. It can be some coding task, where the solution is known, I dont have to spend a lot of power in figuring it out, but I still have to implement it, but my brain starts signalling that because it is known, so its automatically boring and then i procrastinate that work till eternity, and this for an Independent Researcher, where you’re your own supervisor and accountability partner, is a pretty big nightmare.

So many times I catch myself day dreaming about the “interesting” life i’ll start leading the moment i become a full-time researcher, where i’m getting paid for doing research and i dont have to stress about money (thats a topic for different day), i’ll just be free bird in its own paradise, but I miss out on the most obvious reality that these banal tasks will still be part of my day to day and are pretty important for the final result to be shared across, and when the reality doesn’t meet your hyped up expectations, you start questioning whether if this was even worth the pain and effort, had i glamorised it too much (yes, i had), and the most existential of the lot, do i even wanted to do this in the first place or was i just interested in the idea of doing research and not the actual work.

Don’t get me wrong, when push comes to shove, I’ll definitely finish the banal tasks as well, and before the committed deadline, but it’ll definitely feel like dragging a heap of wet sack and not a piece of work which leaves you satisfied at the end of the day, which is a pretty messed up thing, cause you should feel satisfied even in completing the so called “banal” part of work, cause its important. But, that push, which only if it coming from external sources, works for me, and i’m not able to motivate myself on my own to create that push.

One obvious drawback of this way of working is that lot of times I just end up thinking / dreaming about the work instead of actually doing the work, it still feels like lot of work in my head, but in reality nothing gets done, it wastes a lot of time and then my anxiety kicks in sending me in a spiral that i dont have enough time to finish it, which in turns wastes more time… well you see where this is going. Additional fuckery, this overthinking does is that it increases the resistances for doing a particular task, for a 15 min task, you end up overthinking for 45 on how to optimize it, what pros and cons i’ll get from doing it etc etc. and in the end, that task is still not finished, some would say I’m taking this thing too seriously and I should lighten up a bit, and they are probably right, but easier said than done, cause here i feel i’m fighting my core self, who is too serious a person.

Deep down, i know i dont want to be this person, I want to be someone who doesn’t take life this seriously, doesn’t overthink things, starts doing them as soon as possible, fails at them and moves on to the improvement or next thing, in short, lives in the reality instead of his head, and i plan to work on this in 2026. I dont know how it’ll go and hopefully the post-it notes stuck on my monitor keeps me in check whenever i start spiralling.