Cute but this is one degree removed from “shy away from everything that challenges you.”
“The all of nothing mentality is not healthy,” but you can learn and try to do more (and fail) without beating yourself up, too, and you should want to grow.
Another way of looking at it is do things even if you don’t have talent in the area. Im one of those folks that are not a very good doer but while this means I generally just can’t make that fantastic meal that impressives everyone or draw something that approaches reality or really do anything which does not utilize known measurements and timings ; I can do them well enough that it will do. So I can make a decent tasting meal or draw something interesting or write a poem with meaningfulness to me.
Yeah, I agree. It’s not like I disagree with any of the specific points made in the post, but when you put it together it seems very, idk, complacent? Sure, not everything needs to be a challenge, but I also think it’s important to challenge yourself in some things.
Like you alluded to, it means that you’ll fail from time to time, but to me that’s better than never succeeding. Failure is more of an achievement than not trying at all.
Hey kids, do you like violence?
Wanna see me stick nine inch nails through each one of my eyelids?
Wanna copy me and do exactly like I did?
Try 'cid and get fucked up worse than my life is?
Nope. Educate yourself with fact-based knowledge. It’ll pay off in the long run if you know what you’re actually talking about.
It crumbles as soon as you ask “facts according to whom?”
It’s OK and straight forward for simple stuff like classical physics. But as soon as you introduce human subjectivity like goals, meaning, taste, art, fun, enjoyment, etc, it becomes useless. What’s the fact based way of sculpting wood with chainsaws and gas torches? And what is payoff? Payoff for whom? In which way? Money, power, influence, efficiency, fame?
Get off the treadmill, not everything needs to be optimal. Most things cannot, by their own nature, ever be optimal. Just sit back and enjoy life for once.
Extra tip: don’t start comments in social media with “no”, or variations. It’s really rude, hostile, and unnecessarily halts constructive discussion. It invites confrontation and it is a fact based way to make you sound like an ass.
Knowing how stuff is done 100% right and deliberately deciding when something has to be done that way are two different things.
Learn stuff, know stuff, but don’t get bogged down by it.
Best example is graphic design: I used to do everything in vector graphics in Inkscape, all parametric in 1:1 ratio to how it’s going to be printed/presented. Now I go apeshit in pixel graphics in GIMP and it’s so much more useful for a lot of applications, where the goal isn’t as clear cut as let’s say technical drawings; free flowing artsy graphic stuff so to speak.
I know how I’d do it 100% right, but chose not to as the effort increases exponentially for nobody to notice it if that line is completely straight in the corner of a deep fried A4 print of some artwork.
Reminds me of the American mindset of always making something FIRST, THE BEST or THE BIGGEST! Nothing can ever just be nice or comfortable. It can never be “Know the thing next town? Yea we did that here!”, it’s always “Know the thing next town? Yea we wiped the floor with em! Come to us!”. Needless to say, my visit to the states was quite tiring after a while.
I’m trying my best but it’s so goddamn hard. I went to two trade shows past weekend and actually talked to someone new (well, the same person twice, but still). But literally every other person there had a much more extensive collection and knowledge than I do, after 5 years of obessessing over the subject.
I will always just be a very lightly informed amateur without real skills in any field.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about hobby based trade shows, it’s that the highly experienced, obsessed, informed people in obscure hobbies tend to want to spread their knowledge.
Don’t obsess over not knowing… put yourself out there and talk to people and get them to tell you what they find exciting. They will unload knowledge on you and be excited to do so.
It’s just extremely humbling to realize that in this lifetime, I will never have enough time or money to even rise to a middling position in the field. It doesn’t diminish my genuine love for the subject or my personal drive to collect and learn what I can, but at the same time some millionnaire could start in my field tomorrow and have surpassed me in every way including knowledge in just a few months, and that makes me… not envious but just sad. I’ll always be just the dog getting table scraps while the “real” players feast at unimaginable, unattainable hights in perpetuity.
It took me about 7 years to be good at my trade. I was really bad. It did not come easily. It was a nightmare, and seeing guys with less experience than me pick it up way faster than me was demolishing for my self esteem. But I kept at it, decided I was in too deep to quit and I liked it, picked up way more hours and held my head above water. Now I’m the best carpenter I know and own my own contracting company.
It sucks being a slow learner, but if you want it bad enough you can have it man.
People struggle to put themselves out there as amateurs because of this feeling, but it’s totally fine. Most hobbies wouldn’t exist without a range of enthusiasts and skills.
Like, I’ve been pretty into chess for the past couple of years, but I’m still barely “intermediate” at best. Browsing forums and stuff, it seems like everyone is a top 1% player, but that’s mathematically impossible.
