Get as clever as you like in adjacent things. Take risky shortcuts etc to pay the bills in other areas. But the one core thing. Keep it off limits for cleverness, external incentives, and surrendering of control.
Conversation
“Center your purest hobby in your most free hours every day Luke”
I guess I accidentally approximately did that. Except writing would probably not have been the thing I’d have picked if I’d actually given this idea serious thought at say 22.
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Purest = least susceptible to external incentives, most deeply entangled with who you are
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Since a few people are asking what I'd have chosen at age 21 instead of writing if I'd consciously thought of it this way... I've been answering 'parkour'. It's partly a joke, but also partly hindsight wisdom. I'm way overindexed on life of mind over life of body, with high cost.
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I'm not particularly athletic, but not particularly unathletic either, and there was a time when I could have, at relatively low but patient effort, set myself up for a far more healthy future. Now it would take 100x the effort and I'm like "just accept progressive decrepitude"
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yeah I don't mean that path... more like true amateur (not amateur in the institutional/olympic sense)
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Isn’t “accepting progressive decrepitude” a natural compliment to the mediocrity agenda?
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do you mean complement or compliment? :D both make sense in different ways
... I think mediocre over a lifetime requires occasional things that look better than mediocre in chapters
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Haha — I mean complEment, but yes.
So now I realize I was making some sort of “fallacy of composition” — a series of sterling parts enabling a gloriously mediocre whole?
(Somehow this is reminding me of how Tim Farris in fact is a brutal workaholic.)
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I actually address this in one of my posts. If you try to be exactly mediocre all the time, you're being optimally mediocre, which is a contradiction. So you want to be *mediocre mediocre* ... ie sloppy enough about it you end up optimizing sometimes ribbonfarm.com/2018/04/24/sur

