"If I just had more time and money"

The struggle of my life.

"If I just had more time and more money, then I would pursue this." And that always seems to be the way I justify to myself not continuing things I would like to do or learn. Is there any truth to it though? How much more time and how much more money would I need if there is? 
Time is money, as they say, so given enough time I wouldn't need any money. Because what is money? It is just others time marked down on paper or coin. So when I say I need time and money, what I really mean is that I need time and more time.
But what am I really saying? Because if there were 50 hours in a day, 1000 days in a year, and 200 years in a life, would I then pick up that instrument? That book? Would I really find time for those things if I actually had just a bit more to go around? And with a similar consideration, would I give up doing some of the things I love to do if life were instead shorter?

The answer to both these questions is the same... Sure having more or less time would allow or prevent me from doing more or less with my life, but that is only true to an extent. I'm sure that even if life were eternal that I wouldn't do everything; likewise, if life were only a week long I'm sure that I wouldn't give up on everything.

It doesn't seem like I'm really being honest, then, when I excuse myself like this. There are certainly things that I just don't have time for, but the reason I don't do things is never because I sit back and think, "It's fun, but lemme see... Nope, not enough time left to get good at it!" 
The reasons are often complex for why I choose to do some things at the expense of not doing others, it isn't simply that some things make me happy and other things do not. That said, it still seems to be "happiness" that is my motivator for most of the things I end up doing. So where is the disconnect?

The disconnect occurs because our feelings, whatever they may be, are not only induced by each particular moment, but also how we feel about all of those moments on the whole. So, to take an example, say I take some time to sit down at the piano and practice. Perhaps I enjoy the very experience of watching myself progress. That's all fine but when tomorrow comes, will I "want" to practice again or not? It may seem like the answer should surely be yes, but is it really? No, it is not. You see, I could have a thousand good seconds of playing the piano, but tomorrow I won't remember each and every second, I will just remember overall how I felt about the whole thing. Unfortunately all those thousand seconds only account for a small portion of my overall sentiment for the piano; what seems to matter even more is the way I felt when I concluded my session. It is in the conclusion when we throw the contents out the window, and so I do not finish practice for the day and think, "Oh wow, a thousand good seconds! I'll need to do this again." Instead it's more like, "What did I accomplish? How much longer before I'm any good at it?" And in that moment, I've summarized all those thousand good moments in my mind into a single feeling, which amounts to a certain awareness--awareness that it's going to take a very long time before I could reach a skill level which would allow me to forget about taking my skill level into consideration next time I'm considering my sentiments on piano practicing. 
This seems to be one of the things that changes the "piano practice" archive in my head from "15-minutes of pretty good practice time" to "Piano--that darn thing that's going to take gobs of practice before I stop calling it 'that darn thing'".

What's to be done, then? If I can experience something one way and then, upon reflection, archive it in memory as another, how can I actually find this so called "happiness" in both of them? That question is much broader and much more interesting and so will be left to the reader.

There is a finish line, right? It may not seem like it at first, but then we remember the skills which we do possess, the things we've been doing for so long we can forget we are doing them, and in those few examples of success we find the inspiration to try yet again. This success has little to do with our actual ability, the success we feel is when we can be proud of our work, when we can look at it and feel a sort of "wow, I did that...."

That moment seems to be the reason I make excuses like 'more time and money'. I'm comparing myself right now with a particular skill against whatever it would take for me to feel proud of my ability with this skill. I'm not even giving a thought to any pleasure I might get from practicing or just doing it for fun, my mind is immediately on the long term, the proficiency term, and that term looks me in the face and says "I'ma need more time... oh and if you wanna be any good you'll need this this and that, so I'ma need your money too."

Maybe these are legitimate reasons for not pursuing proficiency, after all, it's true that it takes a lot of time to get good at something and we don't have extra bags of it lying around. But hang on because I've dumped a lot of those bags down places like the toilet and my bed and I've fried a lot of screens with my efforts in staring at them while lounging on a sofa of these bags.

It's my experience that whenever I look back on the last year or so, I may not have had the more money part but I certainly feel like I would have traded some of my time spent in some ways for time spent on learning or doing those things which actually do have a high bar for proficiency. This is when I feel smashed in the middle of something.... On one hand I feel like I could have better spent my time on things I'm interested in, on the other, the time I did spend on those interesting things was in fact very engaging and interesting, but here I am, stuck in the middle, telling myself that 'sure those moments were fun but it's going to take THIS much time before you feel a satisfaction for your efforts!'
And so I experience things one way, remember them another, and finally I wish I would have just done more experiencing and less remembering.

How can we remedy this if it is just a natural part of us? If we agree that becoming skilled at something is a lot more satisfying once we get there than spending that time on satisfactions that we can get here and now, how can we get ourselves to participate? Can we really change our natural way of being for a more productive, more satisfying one? To some extent, the answer is certainly yes, and it involves no artificial changes.

Think of the first time you ever had an experience with a skill or hobby, or really anything that caught your interest the first time you experienced it. When you first let yourself be creative in the kitchen, sure the dish may have turned out horrible but it didn't matter because you felt like a master chef while you were making it. I feel this way time and again about a lot of different things, but often it's very short-lived before expectations come knocking.
The reason for this, at least in my mind, is that the very first time I do something I have absolutely no results to look at and therefore I cannot make any kind of comparison between my current skill level and the skill level which I would feel proud of. Even more than that, I know that since this is my very first time I shouldn't expect much and so I feel almost no pressure or expectations from myself. In these moments I find pure joy in just my efforts, in just the adventure of trying something new. So the question is, how do I keep those moments alive even after I have results to compare and personal expectations to meet? The answer, I think, is found within my reason and motivation for continuing to practice.

When I first do something, what is my mindset? My mindset is that I have no idea what I'm doing so the best results I can obtain will come directly from my best efforts in winging it. Okay, but what about the second time or the third time I do something? Somehow the feeling that I can just wing it is lost underneath a hundred feelings of how I can convert the result I obtained from my previous effort, into results which I will feel proud of. All of a sudden not only am I comparing the end product with the ideal product I am imagining, but I am also comparing the methods and results of each step along the way with the ways I now think things must be done. That's a whole lot of internalizing 'I'm doing it wrong.' And so the freely flowing wing attempt I began with is crushed beneath a cinder block of a rule book, and so too is the excitement and creativity I first experienced.

This is all rather curious. I begin by winging it, my ultimate goal is to eventually be good enough to wing it with good results, but somehow I think I can get there faster by not winging it. Where does that thought come from though? Because if it's true that my best effort is in fact my best effort, shouldn't it always be true that applying that effort to the task at hand will yield better results than consulting a rule book which I continue to cook up in my head? Sure these rules might artificially create a finished product that appears like my idealized product, but like I said it's about the feeling and not the product, and so sure I might feel a sense of satisfaction by spending ages on a project until it looks just the way I want, but the whole point of this discussion is about not having to force ourselves to do things this way. I've done it that way plenty of times and so can tell you that once I finish a project in that way, I'm not excited about starting another one because the entire process just felt like a lot of me whispering in my ear telling myself what I'm doing wrong and almost never feeling like I've done it right, even with the final result.

It's no fun to feel like a slave under your own whip, but like I was saying the interesting thing is why I think this is a good method to apply to any creative ventures at all. I can't do better than my best and I can't know more than I do, so why do I think I can create more than I am capable of creating? Why do all of these expectations and pressures arise from a once free environment? And most importantly for this discussion, how do I get back to the mentality that winging it with my best shot is in fact the best I can do when it comes to nurturing my abilities?

This is a difficult thing to do as we are learning something new. After we do something once, it's a very difficult thing to not be constantly reminded of each step you took previously and the results they led to. It's also a very hard thing to not make comparisons, to not identify in our mind the better and worse of two thoughts. Putting these together it's doubly difficult to create something without constantly questioning each step. So where do we escape this?

The escape comes in realizing that we will never really feel satisfied until the whole process comes "naturally" for us. How do we get good at that? The same way we do anything, we practice, in this case we practice doing things naturally. Keeping the same "wing it" mentality that we began with through to our second and third and fourth attempts; not thinking of how our final result will sum up but thinking instead about what our best next step for just the next moment will be. Then the next one comes and then the next, and soon we are finished. We don't have to sit inside of our head telling ourselves everything we did wrong and everything we did right in order to learn and progress... Really. We actually learn all on our own and so without thinking a word, if we now try to do something else with this skill we will be better than we were the last time we did it, but we will be naturally better and there won't be a massive rule book flapping its pages at us.
Finally, one day we will wake up and we will wing it and we will be staring in front of us thinking, "wow, I did that...." And the journey to make it here will have been just as pleasurable as it was on this day of feeling proud, the day we wake up with a little less time and a little less money, but more satisfaction than we had last year when we were wishing we would just go ahead ahead commit already.

Good luck :)