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1 month ago
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Learning something new is a delight. When I approach something unfamiliar, the gains are immediate. Picking up a new sport, a new hobby, learning a new concept, pieces start to click together rapidly. In these early stages, practically any process is going to work, and the barrier to entry is incredibly low.
When I bought a $3 sewing kit and fixed a hole in my pants, I patched it up in an hour using a YouTube video. When I recently started learning the basics of bachata dancing, every 5 minutes spent with my dancer friend unlocked a new movement. Anyone new to coding quickly spits out their Hello World program.
To me, this is really exciting! It feels like growth! Things click fast, and the basic concepts often connect to terms I’ve heard reference to before but never fully understood. And in hobbies that are totally new to me, the unfamiliar fundamentals feel like discoveries, like learning a new language. Either way, I quickly get to experience those “aha!” moments. It’s almost as if I can feel the new synapses forming in my brain in real time!
For this reason, I’ve trained in over a dozen sports over my lifetime, and while I was below replacement level in a few, I’ve competed at a somewhat decent level in a good chunk of them. I love a rotation of fiction and non-fiction, and have become a solid trivia player just from picking up a potpourri of general knowledge.
Even less productively, I sometimes spend hours on wikipedia, getting lost in the depths of niche topics such as non-standard keyboard layouts, Soviet-era closed cities, and Temple OS, a biblically themed operating system described by its creator as a “revelation from God”.
Even on this SubStack, my posts are sporadic and a bit directionless at best!
When it’s easy and accessible, learning is a blast. Knowledge is gained rapidly, and for any skill or hobby, progress is near immediate, and steady improvement continues for quite awhile. For me, this is the best part.
And that’s a problem. Because once I exit the beginner phase, progress slows. Those dopamine hits I crave for each new moment of comprehension or performance begin to spread out, and each milestone requires more and more focus to achieve. For practically any skill, this is where the learning curved becomes “steep”, or, charted differently, becomes asymptotic, which is abundantly clear in my experience rock climbing:
The gravitational pull of the asymptote has flattened my progress curve countless times, and with it, my motivation.
In most of the skills I’ve learned over the years, there comes a time where casual effort is no longer enough to achieve results. This is when a mix of discipline, coaching, and focused, deliberate practice become essential to continue developing. And I don’t tend to put in that work, and consequently, I stop developing.
I have some brilliant friends who crave this feedback loop, where they know that as the work gets harder, the achievements become more impressive. I have other friends who have found one deeply special interest, and are highly motivated to devote their time to the one sport, the one job, the one area of study that has become their passion.
I think it’s a remarkably impressive achievement to look at those I know who have earned PhD’s, had impressive athletic success into adulthood, or have become subject matter experts in their careers. And I’m similarly impressed with my peers who are pursuing creative work they are passionate about, be it in fashion, dance, or journalism.
And yes, the financial incentives don’t often align. The above doesn’t correlate well with salary level. To me, these achievements are even more valuable than that, they are, as my friend Jess Hoffman has said, “tombstone items” - things we can take to our grave, proud that we accomplished in our lifetime.
We all know it’s easy to have a cushy life in the U.S. right now with some mediocre coding skills and a bit of interview practice. It’s a ticket to a comfy, chill, 40-hour/week job with a high salary. This is where I’m at right now. But I’ve not found a singular passion to captivate me - almost certainly, I’m not that kind of person, and that’s ok.
I continue learning new things, exploring new hobbies, traveling to new places, and I’m very fortunate I have the leisure time, health, and ability to do so. It does make me happy. But I don’t have any tombstone items - nothing I’ve built or even contributed to be truly proud of. And I continue to struggle to put in the disciplined work it takes to become excellent at any one skill. Even on this SubStack, my posts are sporadic and a bit directionless at best!
I love being a jack of all trades. Having a breadth of knowledge, even if only surface-level, is surprisingly powerful. It makes meeting new people easier, and it’s deeply satisfying to be able to genuinely follow along, and even contribute a little, when someone talks about something they care about! It’s a far cry from expertise, but it’s a nice foot in the door.
Still, I increasingly realize now, at the age of 32, that to make an imprint on this world, to do something that I’m proud of, it’s going to take years of hard work and focus towards one key idea. I don’t know if I will ever find an idea that will motivate me to put in that work. The gravitational pull of the asymptote has flattened my progress curve countless times, and with it, my motivation. I think it’s still worth looking, though, for that one passion that’s going to stick. I’d like to give something a really good shot at one point in my life. We don’t get to do this forever.
