Choosing One Thing

I look at people who have done great things and it is immediately clear that these people are insanely good at the things they do. Often they are not just insanely good at one thing, but many things. When I look at the records of these people's lives I automatically assume that they have become insanely good at these things simultaneously by just doing these things over time without much real intent. However in my own life I notice that I never really become great at anything I do. There is not a single thing I do in life that I consider myself great at. Maybe I am decent at them, maybe I am decently above average at them, but I am never ever great at them. I have previously written about the struggle to prioritize what I should do at any given time and that my brain is never able to make a consistent decision on what it is I should do. As a result I do many things, but without truly commiting to any one of them, without ever having an unflinching resolve in doing what I am doing.

In relation to the great people I have seen I suspect that I need to take on a new view of how excellent people become excellent. Maybe they did not become excellent by casually doing several things and then over time just become excellent at everything they do. Maybe instead what from the outside looks like suddenly becoming insanely good at many things was actually a sequence of choosing to do one thing and becoming insanely good at that one thing with nothing else mattering and then after that picking a second thing and so on. Maybe this resolve to putting everything in your soul towards one singular pursuit for some period of time is what is needed to truly become excellent at something. Maybe you can't become insanely good at many things at the same time, maybe you can't care about several things enough to excel at them at the same time. When I say that you may have to choose one singular thing I don't mean that you can only do one thing, I instead mean that you can only care about becoming the very best at one singular thing and that in light of this everything else that you may still do does not actually feel like they matter to you.

I have been doing rock climbing for many years and other sports for some time as well and what I have noticed while doing these is for any choosen level of effort or time put into these you will reach a plateau from which you cannot progress. Furthermore after you have reached such a plateau, to stay there you can put in far less effort than it took to get there. I started climbing and in the beginning I only climbed maybe once a week. I felt myself progressing to the second level of grades, but I could not get past it. That was until I, during high school, started climbing 2 to 3 times a week consistently, after this I fairly rapidly progressed to the next grade that I could never reach before. Yet I felt once again that I plateaued at this level never truly progressing past it. Now after this period of climbing 2 to 3 times a week I have had many many periods where I have climbed far less or even periods where I haven't climbed at all. Yet everytime I came back to the climbing gym it didn't take many sessions until I was back at my old peak. It is as if my body had aquired some latent ability that could be tapped into even if it had been in a long slumber.

I suspect that a similar phenomena to the one described here can be applied to the brain and more cognitive or technique based tasks instead of purely physical ones. Maybe by not commiting to only one task I am limiting myself to only putting in a medium amount of effort into everything I do akin to only going once or twice a week climbing. In doing this I might feel that I improve somewhat and then become good at something, but then suddenly reach a plateau from which I cannot progress to the elusive state of being great at something. Maybe this also can explain how these great people can become insanely good at so many things. They may only be focusing on becoming great at one thing at a time, but then when they have become great at it they can move on to becoming great at the next thing without ever losing their latent ability to do the first thing thus accumulating skills that they excell at which from the outside looks like an impossibly incredible arsenal of abilities.

If my analogy between the physical realm of muscles and the neural realm of the brain has any sense of truth in it then maybe I can't become great at anything unless I choose a singular thing as the only important thing to become better at. It may also be possible that there is some other reason that these people are able to do things so much better than me. Maybe they are just inherently far more able to improve at things than I am and that there is nothing to be done about it. While this view may indeed be true, I see absolutely no reason to believe it whether it is true or not. Nothing is gained from believing it regardless of its truth value and in the end I am always gonna choose to believe in things where there is a purpose to believing in them rather than believing in the thing that is objectively true.

Minor extensions

Which thing to choose?

There is a question to be had as to whether you can choose anything at all to become good at or if there has to be some reason for choosing it. Maybe your brain won't accept a thing as mattering the most if you don't have a good reason, or maybe you don't need a reason and you can choose whatever you want as the thing that matters most to improve at as long as you only choose one thing. Regardless as I see it there is no risk for me in choosing a single thing and trying to become good at it because as I live now I won't become truly great at anything at all and to me being only good at something feels near worthless and something that can be readily achieved at any time.

I am nothing

I think one additional thing I have taken from this is that as I am right now I am nothing, I have no skills that I consider more than negligible even though society and other people might consider them valuable. At the end of the day what society or other people think of you and what you can do will never matter more than what you yourself feel and so I have to acknowledge my feelings that in the great scheme of the world of excellent people I am as of yet nothing at all.