Monday, May 23, 2016

Be careful at what you get good at.

I was listening to the Unmistakable Creative podcast with Jessica Abel. She brought up this line from season one of True Detective, 'Life's barely long enough to get good at one thing. So be careful at what you get good at.'

If your lucky you are good at many things, but there's that one thing your really good at doing. Why? Because you spent all of your time doing it. It's like the Gladwell theory of 10,000 hours. If you put enough time and energy into anything you can master it after 10,000 hours.

The energy part is important here. If your doing something for long periods of time mindlessly then you're not getting the most out of your time. You have to pay attention, hold focus and be mindful of the moment to keep improving at what you're doing.

In a 2014 article for Esquire Luke O'Neail wrote about this quote compared to Kurt Vonegut who wrote in his book Mother Night, 'We are what we pretend to be, so be careful what you pretend to be.'

As Marty says, 'Or you end up becoming something you never intended.'

What are you pretending to be? I've pretended to be a lot of things, that seems to be the only thing I ever do is pretend and never end up being anything.

I spend a lot of time getting good at playing the drums, but never became a drummer. Lots of time learning multimedia production, but never become a multimediaist (correct term? Not sure because I'm not one). Spent seven years as an English teacher and got pretty good at it, but never appreciated by my employers so I got fed up with the work, quit and left Japan.

 Now what? What's next? I'm 34 going on 35, my next step has to be a wise one. I should just throw it all out there and see if it lands, otherwise I'll move to Thailand and live out the rest of my days in wild wild west of Asian. Living the lazy life writing dime novels and self-publishing them on Amazon. Honestly, that doesn't sound too bad. I just don't want to hate myself for never trying to pursue something important, if anything we do in this world can be considered important.

But maybe that's a philosophical question for another day.

*This post started as an upbeat motivational piece, but ended up being a self-deprecating slap in the face as I am not feeling that upbeat at the moment, but working hard to lift myself up. I apologize for the sour tone, yet also don't apologize  for being transparent. Thanks for your understanding. At a later time I may take the beginning and rework it into something more beneficial to the human experience. Until then.


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