Counterexamples: Bill Gates nor Arnold Schwarzenegger seem respectively 100% geek and 100% jock, and are among the most successful people on earth. Which seem to show you can be extremely successful without “striking a balance”.
Going 100% geek seems like a perfectly viable strategy, especially if you mostly care about success at geeky things (which amazingly a lot of geeks do).
Which isn’t to say there aren’t any “geek failure modes” to avoid, but “try to strike a balance between geek and jock” doesn’t seem like a very useful rule of thumb.
Good god, no, not at all! Gates is already a product of that (subset of) America culture that makes geeks practical and thus more jockey. Compare Gates with someone like Sartre and you will see the difference, Gates had more “plumber” in his, wanting to solve real-world problems, while Sartre was just basking in highbrowery. This is my point: if you are like Sartre, you need to be more like Gates, that is precisely the point.
Arnold is simply extremely strong-willed and success-oriented. While not a natural-born intellectual, he simply learned the things he needed on the way, learned to respect knowledge and intellectualism as tools to get goals reached and that also pushed him closer to the balance. He was never the kind of weight lifter who would think a scrawny nutrition scientist should not try to teach him things.
Counterexamples: Bill Gates nor Arnold Schwarzenegger seem respectively 100% geek and 100% jock, and are among the most successful people on earth. Which seem to show you can be extremely successful without “striking a balance”.
Going 100% geek seems like a perfectly viable strategy, especially if you mostly care about success at geeky things (which amazingly a lot of geeks do).
Which isn’t to say there aren’t any “geek failure modes” to avoid, but “try to strike a balance between geek and jock” doesn’t seem like a very useful rule of thumb.
Fun fact: Arnold Schwarzenegger paints his own Christmas cards.
Good god, no, not at all! Gates is already a product of that (subset of) America culture that makes geeks practical and thus more jockey. Compare Gates with someone like Sartre and you will see the difference, Gates had more “plumber” in his, wanting to solve real-world problems, while Sartre was just basking in highbrowery. This is my point: if you are like Sartre, you need to be more like Gates, that is precisely the point.
Arnold is simply extremely strong-willed and success-oriented. While not a natural-born intellectual, he simply learned the things he needed on the way, learned to respect knowledge and intellectualism as tools to get goals reached and that also pushed him closer to the balance. He was never the kind of weight lifter who would think a scrawny nutrition scientist should not try to teach him things.
I believe you replied to the wrong comment here, it’s attached to a child comment that’s responding in a similar vein to what you’ve written.