What To Choose

I have come to the decision that I have to choose a single pursuit to put all my soul into. A single pursuit distinct from all others in that it is the only one for which improving truly matters to me. Picking which such craft to hone is in the long term probably not important as the act of truly mastering a craft is probably far more important than the craft itself as it will spread to everything I will do after that point, hopefully awakening some ability to improve that I as of yet do not posess.

Still, there are plenty of short term concerns that I should take into account considering my youth is a precious time in my life and what I do today might impact the reach of my opportunities tomorrow. Primarily there is a concern about what I will get the opportunity of doing towards and beyond the end of my undergraduate studies. One possibility is to choose a pursuit that is directly concerned with my future studies such as investing myself into machine learning, math or something else in within adjacent disciplines. This has the opportunity of being beneficial for what opportunities I will get for graduate school, but it is predicated on my pursuit producing something sufficiently visible beyond the skills I would aquire. Another possibility is to choose something that I know would undoubtedly help my chances at getting the opportunities I want, yet the applicability of these pursuits to my future studies will likely be limited to the general problem solving skills I may aquire. A contender for such a pursuit would be dedicating myself completely to competitive programming while aiming to go as far as possible in the ICPC and to possibly aquire a noticably high rank on a competition arena such as codeforces. A third and probably less likely option is to dedicate myself completely to a pursuit with no connection to my future ambitions. This could be something like learning a language, getting extremely good at a videogame or something like chess or doing something completely different. While this would be a possibility it would likely harm my opportunities in the near future which may turn out to be quite pivotal and thus this option is the least likely to be chosen.

The advantages of the first kind of pursuit more heavily related to my studies is that it might open up long term possibilities for doing great work within the fields I want to work in while also improving the quality of the work I might do at the research lab I am currently in should I continue to work there for the foreseable future. The potential downfall of this choice is that the solution space for what it means to be extremely good at such a field is very wide and so figuring out how to approach "improving" at them might prove difficult.

In contrast the second option of picking a highly visible pursuit such as competitive programming is that it is a very focused pursuit in which the road is already paved and ready to be walked down. I would simply practice a large number of problems while learning the required concepts as I meet them and use the available competitions to continually track my progress in this pursuit. It also has the advantage of having a tangible goal and reward for my future opportunities through the official competitions I would participate in. The drawback of this choice is of course that something like competitive programming would likely not be of huge value to my future pursuits beyond job interviews and becoming more adept at solving hard conceptual problems, and I would likely not progress in the fields I actually want to work with in the future due to being fully dedicated to this. This may of course not be a problem as it may turn out that after I am done with pursuing competitive programming I could turn to dedicate myself fully to the first option, but at a later point in my life where I may be more adept at practicing my one chosen craft.

To conclude I think it is important to note that what is far more important than what I choose, is that I actually choose something in the near future and that I stick to my choice until I feel like I have sufficiently mastered the craft to a level beyond any skill I have today. It is hard to say how long such a dedication would have to be. The lower bound is probably in the realm of months and the upper bound could be everything in the realm of decades at which point I would probably have other matters to attend depending of course on the type of pursuit. Something like competitive programming likely has more of an upper bound in the realm of years before I could reach a sufficiently high level, at which point the pursuit itself has lost its purpose and my time would be better spent on a different pursuit.