Recently, this substack caught my attention. Since reading it 4 or 5 days ago my mind keeps going back to it, as the main premise (you need to focus on a few things to be good at them) is kind of opposite to the way I´ve been living.
The article talks about how having too many goals will hinder your performance, and while in this case he mainly refers to career goals (classic programmer behavior), it can also apply to hobbies. While most of my life I have been juggling many interests, I believe never as many as I do now.
I’m pretty serious at all of those, and I could add more but I think those are the main things that I care about. I also hold a social life and meaningful relationships. I like my method of having many things I am interested in as it allows me to switch from one to another as many times as I want since most of them have very little friction for leaving and entering.
But I get the point of the article, as I constantly feel like I´m not being as productive as I could be. I dont think that my relationship with productivity is particularly unhealthy but its something I have been pursuing and measuring for a long time. I think the amount of context switches I´m doing in a day does not allow me to give my best to most things.
Right now I don’t care about that, as I do not have any pressure to make any of them my career path, and in general, I find myself in a comfortable situation that allows me to have very few limits on the things I could do with my life (I’m extremely grateful for that), but I can see reaching a point when to make or do something truly meaningful I will have to start cutting down on the spread of my interests. Im definetly spread too thin.
In the meantime, I would like to encourage anyone reading this to try new things in general, as I find that it´s one of the most satisfying this I could find in the human experience.
Also related.