Finding my North Star

I have noticed that when I are with other people or work on some objective assigned by someone else I am usually able to fully invest myself into the work and perform at what I often consider to be near my peak efficiency. While in this mode I don't feel the tendency to be distracted even going so far as to an entire day without feeling the need to eat. However when I am on my own such as in my appartment or in a place where noone else is working on anything in particular I suddenly go into a far more flimsy way of being. I try to do some work on different projects I have started or skills I want to learn, but I am never able to settle in on one task and I do some work here and some work there, but in the end not amounting to much, atleast nowhere near the amount of progress I would have been able to if I was in the efficient mode described earlier.

I find that my brain can never really decide on what I should be doing at any given moment and so I just rotate around my set of tasks I want done never fully commited to any one task. I think part of the difference between these two modes is that in the first one my brain has decided on which task is most important to do, either because I work with someone with such an objective and I adopt their goal or objective , or because I have been given an assignment and my brain decides that in order to impress/not let down whoever gave me the task that is the most important thing to be working on. In the other mode however I feel like I have no overarching guiding principle that tells me what to do. I have no greater objective that my brain can latch onto and make a decisive priority and so in my uncertainty of what to do, I end up doing nothing at all, often ending up distracted by whatever stream of thought coming my way.

The reason I feel like this is a crucial problem to solve for me is that I have a strong desire to be great and I feel a great sense of fulfilment while in a state where I work at maximum efficiency on some craft. I suspect that resolving this issue might be the key to unlocking a state of mastery where I can become truly extraordinary in something through being in this efficient state of work over a long period of my life. I think with the way I do things today I can only become good at the things I try to work on without feeling this sense of direction, but I don't think I can ever reach a point where I would call myself great at it.

In some way this is about unlocking a state of rapid self improvement at all times. I think a good analogy to the field of AI is how as I am today, I am a neural network primarily trained using supervised learning as I only improve at a significant rate when given specific work by some external party, while the state I am trying to achieve is more akin to a hypothetical perpetually self-improving AGI always becoming better and smarter through no other means than itself.

I see two potential solutions to this problem. The first is to take advantage of the fact that I reach this state while working with other people. Maybe I could find someone who has a greater purpose for themselves and latch onto their dream supporting them as far as I can. The issue I see with this solution is that there will always be times when I won't have someone around me to aquire this state. I will always have times where I am all alone and where I inevitably find myself returning to a state of directionless wandering. Maybe that is fine, maybe we don't all have to be great or reach our peak at all times, maybe it's fine to be mediocre most of the time and good only some of the time. I find this view reasonable, yet inherently unsatisfying and far too similar to the idea of giving up, which my brain isn't able to fully accept. The other solution is naturally to find some greater principle to guide me at every moment in life, some North Star that I can align myself by. It seems to me like this is the perfect solution and the one that would allow me to truly live a fulfilled life, yet it also appears to me like a daunting task in which I have not even the slightest clue of how to begin looking for an answer.

It feels very biblical that the best path in life will also be the hardest and that an easy path will never lead to a place you want to be, and so the only choice here is to take on the task of finding something which can guide my life. I will likely put away all other non-urgent pursuits until I have found the answer to this question as I don't think I would do any more than negligable work on any of them while not being able to reach a state of decisive focus and all work I could do now would undoubtably be only a fraction of what I would be able to achieve if I could reach a state of consistently high efficiency and focused work.

This is my declaration of war on myself and my flimsy sense of direction. Nothing else I can do in my life right now is more important than finding the answer to this question and for this reason I must dedicate everything to finding it.