I know this is a kinda radical view, but since it has personally helped me I’m willing to ignore what others say and go this route of thinking. It’s that goals and dreams are very bad and they will put a lot of pressure and frustration onto you.
Frustration to me is a big indicator that you are doing something wrong. It’s a feeling that usually arises from ignorance or lack of understanding. You have a goal, but cannot reach it, therefore you get frustrated. But it’s not always about knowing how to do something, but also about knowing if something is even possible or in reach. If your goal is to find a cow on the ocean, then frustration is a logical consequence.
You have to understand that you have to work within your circumstances. Who are you? Where do you live? How much money do you have? What’s your character like? What are your skills? What are your interests? What do you hate? What do you like? How much time do you have? How well is your physical and mental health?
Those are all constraints that limit what you can do. They are the conditions you work with. If you fully align with those conditions then you can start saying the following to yourself:
“I’m a game developer and a game developer develops games.”
That’s enough, you take your existing skills and work with them. You make what you can make, within your constraints. No more goals and dreams. No more inspiration for big project. No more trend or money chasing. You are a game developer and you just make the games you can make, within your individual circumstances.
And then? Then your only goal becomes expansion. You expand your comfort zone, you expand your skills, you expand your health or whatever you want to expand. But you start exactly from where you are and you begin to work with what you have. If you can only do programming, then program. Make a game that utilizes your programming skills. And if you want to learn something new, learn it, and when you can do it, you can expand your game with the newly learned skills.
But here comes my next point: Actually make something with the skills you currently have. I personally often learn stuff and then what I learned lands on a shelf and gets dusty. This means sitting on dead skills, completely unused. If you can program, you can make a game, so actually use it. Make a product with those skills. Don’t just sit on them. And you’ll come to realize that you do not have to learn everything to make a game. Yes, you can make a good game only with programming and some free assets. Even just with simple shapes. You do not need to learn everything.
But where does this need to learn everything come from? I’d say it’s dreams & goals. It’s when you have this dream game in your head, it’s 3D, animated, beautiful etc. – And you want to achieve that. Dreams that disregard your comfort zone to an extreme extend. It doesn’t make you expand your comfort zone, it makes you violently leave your comfort zone to a degree of complete distress and frustration. And also it completely under-utilizes your current existing skill set.