I remember back in 2007, I was on a 10 month working holiday, running the internet cafe in a double decker bus at a backpacking hostel/campsite in Venice, Italy... every night I got to party in the bar with a bunch of backpackers, and every morning I got to nurse my hangover while the same backpackers checked their e-mail and sent messages to family back home.
It was a lot of fun, but I certainly felt after a while that I was just spinning my wheels, that my life wasn't progressing.
To combat this I set myself a really basic goal: Achieve one thing every day.
I found that helped a lot... even if it was something really small, at least I felt like I was progressing towards an end goal.
In hindsight I really wish I'd used all the time I had sitting in that Internet cafe to setup a few niche websites, as a decade later they'd probably be crushing it in affiliate sales from Amazon!!
Wow, that's quite a life you live back then, @rossdcurrie.
Achieve one thing every day, that's like the increase 1% improvement every day that Kaizen advocates. Everyday just run for 1 minute longer, and before you know it, in a month, you're doing an additional half hour!
Don't be too hard on yourself, chief. I like to thing those 10 months give you enough experience to 1) not want to do it anymore now, and 2) tell really good hangover stories. All in all, I like to think it's building the muscle of hindsight thinking. It's always best to live life forward.