This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://curi.us/2583-your-top-five-goals-a-productivity-method
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I think you’re right. I have sometimes a become saddened or overwhelmed by the amount of things that I’ve picked up and got kinda good at but not great at (especially with music). At times I want to study them all, but then I’m like, well okay how am I going to seriously study piano, guitar, drums, singing, composing, recording, and do philosophy, work on my career, relationships etc. It’s a little bit heart breaking thinking there are things I may have to just avoid working on.
I was aware of the idea of considering what things to prioritise, but it hadn’t occurred to me that taking a goal seriously means avoiding working on other lower priority goals altogether.
I totally recognise the behaviour these talk about in myself.
I think this is important.
Do you recognize being heart broken as meaning there’s a problem to address here? It basically means you’re misunderstanding something: the principle, whether the principle is true, how the principle applies to your life, emotions, something.
Maybe you could argue that being heartbroken is an appropriate response sometimes, e.g. to death. But we’re talking about an abstract concept not an event. So either the concept is wrong or being upset about it is sort of a category error. Like if you were upset because you can’t fly, that’s mostly false (you could fly in lots of ways, just not unaided), and also to the extent it’s true that you can’t fly, it’s not the right sort of thing to be heartbroken about. Being heartbroken about it indicates there’s some sort of error involved somewhere.
Understood.
Not entirely. Why does being (a little bit) heartbroken mean that?
You say it means I’m misunderstanding something.
I think the principle we’re talking about is that you can’t get great at 20 things. You’ll fail trying. And by trying you’ll also fail at getting great at any one thing.
If I fully understood and was fully convinced of that, I wouldn’t feel disappointed/heartbroken about it? Like how I am not heartbroken about not being able to do things other things that are impossible?
And since I feel negatively toward that principle, part of me is in conflict with it somehow, whether it disagrees with/misunderstands it or something to do with it?
Am I on the right track?
You shouldn’t be coercing yourself to focus or to avoid activities. You shouldn’t be conflicted and trying to force yourself to do what you’re intellectually sure is right but intuitively or emotionally resistant to. You have a conscious/subconscious clash/contradiction.
Don’t downplay the importance of your emotions or intuitions by saying it’s only a little bit of heartbreak. It’s good that you recognized and expressed the conflict. You shouldn’t try to accept abstract essays that you don’t like (particularly in the self-help genre). It’s important to look for problems and push back on things.
How great do you want to be at piano, guitar, drums and singing? How long do you think it would take to reach that skill level? Do you want to be top 100 in the world at each of those? Do you want to perform on stage to large crowds doing each of those? Do you just want to be able to make music alone with those elements, without having to collaborate with others in order to create your music? Do you enjoy the activities and want to be able to do them well?
There are many different standards of greatness and it may help to be more specific.
Also, there are dozens of other things you could want to be great at. I think you’re OK with not being a great doctor, lawyer, chemist, hair stylist or architect, right? Or does that bother you too? If so, are you maybe bothered by mortality and want unlimited time to do everything? The stuff you expressed interest in seems reasonably well grouped, like a lot is music related, so there’s significant overlap in the skills; it doesn’t sound like trying to do everything and sounds more like a reasonably focused interest. Music + philosophy is two things, not being a generalist (and being a generalist isn’t bad).
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I want to reply to this further by the way. I appreciate you asking questions here to try to help me understand more about this problem. I’ve started to write a response and it got long and I got worried that it was perhaps presumptuous like I was expecting you to now talk to me about all these things about my life and my goals and what I should do.
I might answer some quick things without thinking too hard right now.
No that doesn’t bother me at all. I never wanted to be any of those things. Though architecture seems really cool I don’t think I’d actually like it.
My mortality does bother me, but in relation to things I do want to be good at or might want to try. Not those other things you suggested.
I feel bad that I wasn’t more concerned about the problem of how to effectively use my life >10 years ago. Though to be fair to my younger self, I’m actually kind of impressed and grateful at what I have learned and the interests I’ve found without any real plan. I’ve recently turned 30 and it feels like I’m at a point where I don’t have a lot of room for mistakes.
Yeah I think you’re right. I do have quite a focussed interest here.
I think I’ve picked up some ideas that pursuing it is bad. Or it’s not rational, or something. Like if I’m going to do it I need to be trying to be not only aiming for really high standards, but actually have a good chance at achieving them. Something in me says its a waste if you don’t actually achieve actual prime-mover greatness. And I guess I have doubts that I could achieve that with music, and I’m not even sure I want to. Sure that’d be cool. But I don’t know if I have it in me. Like I don’t think I’m going to match some of the great’s contributions to music. But I just really like the idea of doing music and it’s a pretty deep emotional that goes back a long way. It’s a dream of mine, as they say. The idea of perhaps deciding to not do it is saddening. It’s also saddening that this conflict has meant I’ve done little music over the last 2-3 years. It feels like I’ve softly given up on it.
That’s not how that works. You’re always going to be making mistakes, struggling, doing your best, being at the beginning of infinity, being fallible, etc.
The only way to look back 10 years from now and think you didn’t make mistakes is to not grow and progress during those 10 years. If you keep learning new things, then you’ll also in retrospect find that what you did in the past doesn’t meet your current standards. (But you can respect the effort you made, respect the reasonable decisions made given your past context when you had less knowledge, etc.)
Sounds like you should do music. That all-or-nothing demand for outlier greatness is unreasonable and toxic.
Also greatness isn’t predictable, reliable, or something you can guarantee or even expect in advance. Great music comes from people who did not know they would make great music and tried to do music anyway. If lots of people do work on something then sometimes things will work out very well. If 100 people do something, then on average one of them will make top 1% contributions. If 10 million people do something, then 100 will make top 0.001% contributions and people will call those “great”. (If anyone thought they’d definitely be super outlier prime-mover great, in advance of achieving it, they were arrogant and foolish, and they did great work despite that bad attitude that made things harder. If anyone thought in advance they would be “great” and meant top 5%, that’s maybe fine. The term has a lot of ambiguity for just how great someone means.)
In addition to not being able to predict greatness in advance, you also can’t reliably predict non-greatness in advance.
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