Nice post. It prompts two questions, which you may or may not be the right person to answer:
How do you find good obsessions? Is it “just” a matter of being curious and widely-read? What is the combination of life practice and psychological orientation that leads a person to become obsessed with one or more ideas in the way that you became obsessed with progress studies and with Fieldbook?
On your path to world-class status, how do you avoid the “middle-competence trap” (analogy to the middle-income trap)? How do you handle having something you love that you’ve gotten damn good at, better than most people will ever get, but can’t seem to break through to the level of the achievers who really make their mark on the field? Maybe this is more of an issue for me than for others—maybe for example it is “just” a matter of being willing to burrow deep into something to the exclusion of your other interests in life, and I’m too much of a generalist to do that—but it’s been a problem for me twice now, and I really wonder if it might be a common failure mode of this kind of questing process.
1. Maybe for everyone it would be different. It might be hard to have a standard formula to find obsessions. Sometimes it may come naturally through life events/observations/experiences. If no such experience exists yet, or one seems to be interested in multiple things, I have received an advice to try different things, and see what you would like (I agree with it). Now that I think about it, it would also be fun to survey people and ask them how they got their passion/do what they do (and to derive some standard formula/common elements if possible)!
2. I think maybe we can approach with ” the best of one’s ability”, and when we reach that, the rest may depend a lot on luck and other things too. Maybe through time, we could get better eventually, or maybe some observations/insights accidentally happened, and we found a breakthrough point, with the right accumulation of previous experience/knowledge.
Nice post. It prompts two questions, which you may or may not be the right person to answer:
How do you find good obsessions? Is it “just” a matter of being curious and widely-read? What is the combination of life practice and psychological orientation that leads a person to become obsessed with one or more ideas in the way that you became obsessed with progress studies and with Fieldbook?
On your path to world-class status, how do you avoid the “middle-competence trap” (analogy to the middle-income trap)? How do you handle having something you love that you’ve gotten damn good at, better than most people will ever get, but can’t seem to break through to the level of the achievers who really make their mark on the field? Maybe this is more of an issue for me than for others—maybe for example it is “just” a matter of being willing to burrow deep into something to the exclusion of your other interests in life, and I’m too much of a generalist to do that—but it’s been a problem for me twice now, and I really wonder if it might be a common failure mode of this kind of questing process.
1. Maybe for everyone it would be different. It might be hard to have a standard formula to find obsessions. Sometimes it may come naturally through life events/observations/experiences. If no such experience exists yet, or one seems to be interested in multiple things, I have received an advice to try different things, and see what you would like (I agree with it). Now that I think about it, it would also be fun to survey people and ask them how they got their passion/do what they do (and to derive some standard formula/common elements if possible)!
2. I think maybe we can approach with ” the best of one’s ability”, and when we reach that, the rest may depend a lot on luck and other things too. Maybe through time, we could get better eventually, or maybe some observations/insights accidentally happened, and we found a breakthrough point, with the right accumulation of previous experience/knowledge.