>But you can never be sure. In fact, here's an interesting idea that's also rather alarming if it's true: it may be that to do great work, you also have to wast

>But you can never be sure. In fact, here's an interesting idea that's also rather alarming if it's true: it may be that to do great work, you also have to waste a lot of time. >In many different areas, reward is proportionate to risk. If that rule holds here, then the way to find paths that lead to truly great work is to be willing to expend a lot of effort on things that turn out to be every bit as unpromising as they seem. So true. With highly capable instrumentation, each type of pursuit can often be seen as a potential lifetime effort so careful compromise needs to be made from the earliest time. Musically, a singular focus on jazz, or classical, or pop music for instance can be the most legitimate path to top performance in a recognized idiom. Alternatively, other performers might spread themselves thinner between genres, sometimes only for practice or personal satisfaction by those whose professional performance is in a single genre itself. And that's only recognized genres. What if the instrument itself still has more possibilities to offer? A practioner (or hobbyist) could go off on a tanget, even a direction known from the outset not expected to be recognized, and whether it was a waste of time really depends. It's possible that higher levels of performance can be achieved by greater development of instrument familiarity at the expense of focused musical practice that could have been accomplished in its place, and the outcome could be different than that which could be achieved otherwise. Same goes for scientific instruments. If you're going to break new ground, you're going to need to experiment. And of course most experiments are going to fail, that's why they are called experiments. To attempt completely avoiding having this type of failure waste any of your time whatsoever, you can simply try to never experiment, at least not in any way you are aware of. But if you want to reach new milestones, you can't let that stop you, and since you are going to be going forward with many projects which will never be fruitful anyway, might as well include some with even less of an obvious chance. You will best work harder and smarter than those focusing only on the recognized stuff, and can not become dependent on unbroken progress. >If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? >AEinstein