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Hello everyone! Today I want to hear from you on this topic that it is often on my mind.
Let us suppose that you do three main things in your life: playing drums, playing a computer game and reading books concerning your job/study field.
To get better at one of these things, you have to practise it. This is uncontestable. So you start playing drums 2 hours each day and you get better at it. However, some sort of sadness kicks in when you realize that you are not dedicating as much time to the other 2 activities.
The bottom line question is this: how do you cope with the fact that improving in a field will always (due to 24 hours days) come with stagnation/less improvement into another field?
It may seem like a stupid question at first but lately I have been thinking about it more and more. Does improvement comes with this sacrifice? It seems that no matter what you do, you will end up losing something. Going out every night? you get very social, less shy but your work/studies may suffer. Stay at home reading all day? You'll become very proficient but not that sociable and you can gain weight if you don't move. I am sure you get my point.
tl,dr: how do you cope with the fact that improving in a field will always (due to 24 hours days) come with stagnation/less improvement into another field?
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United States24803 Posts
Well yea, pretty much everything has an opportunity cost. By working on drums, you aren't working on the computer game. However, I always feel like I need to take a break from something, even if I'm serious about it. That's a good time to play the computer game instead of working on the drums.
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You could try to make a list of all the things you want to get better at, force yourself to put them in order of importance and then arrange your daily schedule in such a way that you give more time to things you think are more important. Also, there are usually little bits of downtime (browsing reddit for example) that I could probably rearrange into more constructive work on something to give me "more hours" to the day.
I assume it is an issue most of us struggle with and just comes down to you prioritizing things over others.
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There's two ways that I think about this.
First you have to decide what you really want. 100% optimal performance at an activity isn't always the reason that you do that activity. Frequently you just want to be good and able to express yourself with it, and to have fun. You want to have the skill, but you don't necessarily need to be the very greatest at it.
Second, even if you don't want to be the greatest, you want to be pretty drat good. In this case you can choose activities which compliment one another and thereby become better at the others while practicing one at a time.
In real life for me, I have a couple of main things I like to get better and better at, and then something much more important which is just learning a completely new skill every so often because I don't want my brain to stagnate. I suspect, although I have no research to back me up, that it is much more important you consistently challenge your brain to learn new and difficult things than it is to try to make tiny gains in a skill you're already very good at. I know that there has at least been a lot of research to show this is important to lowering your risk of Alzheimer's and other terrible brain things that happen to you when you get old.
tl;dr it's probably a huge mistake to get tunnel vision and only do one thing your whole life, even if you could bear the tedium of it. I'm not even sure you would get your optimal performance doing that, because you'd cut yourself off from the insight other activities offer.
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You must be setting your New Years resolutions or something.
Time is limited. It's a fact of life. Your question is like asking how do you cope with the fact that we can't kamehameha like Goku. You don't cope with it because you know it's an impossibility. It's not even in the realm of what you find to be possible so you're not sad that it is not happening.
Coping means you're sad because your expectations aren't being met somehow. You can change this either by altering your surroundings or yourself. In this case, you need to lower your expectations because you just can't do everything all the time. There is not enough time and the human capacity is limited. You will suck at many things in life, then you will die. So prioritize accordingly.
But on a bright note, Happy New Year!
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EPT
