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It is impossible to be really good at everything.... when I optimized for work, my fitness goals went through the window. When I optimized to get a project do

It is impossible to be really good at everything.... when I optimized for work, my fitness goals went through the window. When I optimized to get a project done, my reading (books) went down as well. When I optimized for fitness (working out and soccer), my work and side projects started progressing slower. It is very hard to work on your project at home, when you are in a intense bulking, or 'cutting' phase, and once you come home form the gym you just want to chill.... When I say 'optimize for', I mean that particular facet of your life becomes the more important one, and you spend more energy. Often you have to make choices: eg. social life, or project you are working on? The only key I found is to be good/focus your energy in one area at a time, while just being happy with being 'good enough' at other areas. Once you reach a desired in one area, you can switch your focus to other ones. *eg: once you reached a desirable physical shape, you can switch to 'maintain mode', and focus your energies to something new (e.g. learning a new tech, or starting a project). As gym rats say: 'Maintaining' is always easier than "Gaining, or Cutting". It is just physically impossible to optimize on everything in your life, no matter how ambitious you are, or how much 'grit' you have. (eg. you can't start a ambitious project, while having a great social life, and bulking up in the gym, while playing soccer regularly multiple times a week, and having a full time job, at the same time).

jimbob45 6y ago
It's not impossible...but it requires strict time management and everyone else in your life will try to steal your earmarked time and complain that you never want to do anything. Even then, I agree - I'm constantly accidentally over prioritizing and having to even back out.
- llamataboot 6y ago
  I find it's much better to always do whatever I want to do, and if I find out I'm not doing what I want to be doing even if I'm doing whatever I want to do, inquire into what sort of crazy thing led me to believe I wanted to do X while I was doing Y because I wanted to do Y. Conscious hedonism is the only way to live, but you better be willing to be conscious, cause doing what you "want" sucks until you get good at it.
- ardit33 6y ago
  yeah, it is physically impossible.... I gave you two disciplines: bulking up in the gym, or playing soccer... while bulking up, you gain both muscle and some fat, and your soccer performance will suffer as your weight will increase, and your larger biceps and pecs really wont help your soccer game much (there is a reason that pro soccer players don't look like body builders). Also playing lots of soccer will hurt your 'gains'. (too much cardio is a 'gains' killer). On the other side, while 'cutting', to be leaner, you are running on a calorie deficit for multiple weeks, or months, and your soccer performance will suffer since you are so glycogen depleted..... You can be good at both, but not the "best you can be" at both disciplines at the same time as optimizing for one, will hurt your other one, and that's just physics. Hope that makes sense....
  - momentbruh 6y ago
    You are not going to be the best you can be at anything, unless you focus on it every waking hour of the week. Let go of that illusion and training things concurrently is a lot less anxiety-inducing.
  - inertiatic 6y ago
    That's almost entirely broscience. Being at a slight deficit won't hurt your soccer performance. You're not a top tier professional that needs to optimize for every tiny thing. Even if you are, Ronaldo is shredded and is a top 5 footballer. And most footballers are naturally very lean, so what you're saying doesn't even make empirical sense. Should you expect to play the Champion's League finals while preparing to do poses at a bodybuilding show and do your best? No, but you could conceivably do these a few weeks apart. Cardiovascular activity won't "kill your gains", there's no such consensus, you just have to be smart about your caloric intake. There's no physical law involved here so saying it's "just physics" sounds very dismissive.
    - pawelmurias 6y ago
      Pro body building is built around taking insane amounts of roids which will get you caught during drug testing in pro soccer.
- watwut 6y ago
  > everyone else in your life will try to steal your earmarked time and complain that you never want to do anything. That is good phase. The bad phase is when those people eventually disappear and you have hard time to connect with anyone new.
- onion2k 6y ago
  everyone else in your life will try to steal your earmarked time and complain that you never want to do anything Being able to say "No", and being willing to let people down because there are things you need to do that are more important than them, is a really important skill when you're running a startup. You can't succeed if you're giving up all your time to other people's things. You have to stop and tell them you won't do what they're asking because you're focusing on your own stuff. They will complain. Some of them will stop talking to you. You might really annoy your family. Your real friends will understand and still be there when you're finished. Some of them might happily come along and help you with what you're doing.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    You are dscribing a perfect way for an early burn-out and a lonely life. Relationships are one of the most important things in life, and I say this as a guy who could litteraly not talk to anyone for two weeks strait. It's relationships with people that get you your first customers for your start-up, your key employees. relationships keep you down to earth, friends and fmily. The latter being one of the most important elements in your life, your kids and spouse. Why am I saying this? Because relationships go both ways. When you care about people, chances are some of them will care about you as well. And if you don't really care about your customers, your company is screwed anyway. Granted, everyone has a different bandwidth to handle these relationships, and seperating the toxic ones from the rest is problem. Which makes relationships all the more important.
    - onion2k 6y ago
      I didn't say that you should say no to everything. I said you should develop the ability to say no to things that you don't want to do because you have more important things to spend your time on. Trying to make everyone around you happy by giving up time you want to spend on important things is a much quicker route to burn out than declining some meetings you don't care about.
      - ct520 6y ago
        I hate to say amongst the commenters I don’t think your opinion is a popular one here. I agree with you.
- ct520 6y ago
  Optimize, prioritize, delegate, outsource. Not impossible at all. Learning to balance it takes time. But I assure people it can be done and I’m proof.
nmfisher 6y ago
I think you hit the nail on the head. It's good advice, particularly if you're someone with a short attention span who's constantly jumping from project to project. Nowadays, it's so easy to see just how far the talent pool is across the globe. You see the awesome cello player on Instagram, the amazing 3D games artist on Twitter, the world class gymnast on TikTok. You get so excited and inspired, and naturally, you want to be able to do the same. But you can't pick up three things at once. Those people are exceptional because they focused on one thing - and only one thing only - for a long time. You only see what they produce, not the countless years of practice and frustration and experimentation that it took for them to get there. That's not saying you can't get good at multiple things. But particularly for adults (who have far less free time than children), you are much better off concentrating on a single "improvement" goal at any one time. Maintain your other skills, sure, but accept that other people will overtake you in those areas. If you try and compete with everyone at everything, you'll just end up losing.
- toyg 6y ago
  Indeed. Also, nobody posts their failures online. You only see success, and the path to that success is hidden or even misrepresented (“I made this in an afternoon!” ... and 5 years working 8h/day on the necessary skills).
  - tonyarkles 6y ago
    I've started to make a conscious effort to post about my failures on Twitter specifically to help address that a bit, especially when they're hilariously bad (e.g. crashing a model airplane 3 seconds into its flight). Naturally, I've been failing at doing this consistently :)
    - robotnikman 6y ago
      I'm starting to find that people making posts about their failures offer me more value than people who post about their success. Reading them usually helps me be less hard on myself, and also sometimes provide insights into how to avoid such pitfalls myself in the future
wiradikusuma 6y ago
..while having family/kids (but when you have them, your priority usually shifts anyway, so not a bad thing)
- deleted 6y ago
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mikekchar 6y ago
I have a "rule of 3". You can be quite good at 3 things (give or take). One of them will probably be your job. One will probably be your relationships. You have time for 1 more. If you keep changing your mind about what that last one will be, then you will only be good at 2 things. There are ways to be good at only 1 thing as well.... or even 0...
- grenoire 6y ago
  Very much in line with my experience, but in fact for me it wasn't even 'being quite good at,' but just sufficiently managing and exceeding minimum expectations. In my college years that was, for example, studying, working, and managing the faculty magazine. I had no time to give to friends or socialise even. Relationships are definitely taking up one of these 'slots,' so to say.
- cambalache 6y ago
  A "thing" is just such a vague and general concept that is useless. If either your job or your relationships can be reduced to only mastering 1 thing I really envy you. If you say I am being unfair and of course it involves many sub-tasks , so why dont just choose to be good at life? So you can concentrate in just one thing and still have 2 other "things" to spare. Now, less snarky and more serious, in any activity or discipline you choose, there are people who are dedicating their whole life to it, so you have 3 options.1) Hope your natural talent will compensate the less hours you dedicate to it (this is almost always false). 2) Accept you will never be as good as the crazies who spend all of their time on it.3)Join the fray and invest all your time on it. Almost all great creations in humanity, things like Einstein's theory of relativity, Dante's Divine Comedy, Egypt's pyramids are the result of incredible and exclusive dedication for many many years.
  - mikekchar 6y ago
    What you say is absolutely correct ;-) However, I still find it useful to think in these terms. For example, I'm working on a game in my spare time and streaming (most of it) on Twitch. But I'm also making cheese and doing a lot of research for it. I keep thinking of writing a book about cheesemaking because the information available to normal people is by and large pretty awful. So I think to myself, "Are you willing to give up your game in order to write your book?" And the answer is, no. I may slowly write a few things here or there, though (just to reduce the amount of time I spend answering questions on reddit!) But I think a book would be a very bad idea for me even though it is sooo tempting.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I've never thought of myself as being particularly "gritty" in anything; for me personally, mediocrity is good enough. I'm boring in that I get up and go to bed at reasonable times, in that I play video games for a couple hours at most, then I think I've had enough. I'm not trying to humblebrag, it's not something I do conscientiously, my main point here is that not excelling, not "doing your best" is also fine. In agile methodologies the phrase "sustainable pace" is a recurring theme. You'll be in this life for 80 years if you're lucky, no need to burn through all that in a few years. I've worked for nearly ten years at my previous company (consultancy), the most dedicated, hardworking people all ended up with burnout. I mean sure, I guess they earned a bit more money and stuff, but they also spent at least six months up to a year completely out of action, some went straight back into it and had to be put out of action again. And I hope they ask themselves "was it worth it".
- puranjay 6y ago
  This sort of "marathon" thinking isn't appreciated enough. You'll learn and do more with 10 hours/week of something for 10 years than 60 hours/week of something for 6 months. The latter severely underestimates the long term cognitive and sheer physical burden of intense effort. Unless you are pursuing something that has an age or time factor (say, professional sports), I truly believe it's better to be a "marathon runner" than a "sprinter" when it comes to learning
  - chepaslaaa 6y ago
    Most professional athletes have about 20 years of practice before peaking (maybe around 15 in sports where the athletes peak younger such as gymnastics). When you see Eliud Kipchoge or Alex Honnold's achievements in their 30s being celebrated, you don't see them at 15 years old at regional competitions being average-among-the-decent.
- CalRobert 6y ago
  Unfortunately those same people also push others (or worse, their direct reports) to burn out as fast or faster than themselves.
- 6y ago
Keloo 6y ago
This remind me of the Howard Marks 'Economic Reality' essay. https://www.oaktreecapital.com/docs/default-source/memos/economic-reality.pdf https://www.oaktreecapital.com/docs/default-source/memos/eco...
CalRobert 6y ago
Then you have a kid and realize just how much free time you actually had...
- olau 6y ago
  Hah, that actually works more than once, as in "Then you have a(nother) kid and realize just how much free time you actually had".
  - jahn716 6y ago
    It only took two for me to learn my lesson haha
  - bluGill 6y ago
    As kids get older they take time differently. Just had my third kid and I notice a great difference in how time is used. My 6 year old is happy to spend time with my playing openttd (how he plays is interesting to an adult), and I go do something else at the same time. The baby needs me to hold her all the time and so I can't really do anything.
  - CalRobert 6y ago
    Every night I think "hey I ought to hack on that little side project" after the 2 year old goes to bed but then the 6 month old wants to be held and cuddled and there's no way I'm telling her no so I can go work on a Scrapy project. It can wait.
xz0r 6y ago
I'd argue, its not impossible. There might be people who are able to manage everything, we just don't know.
GistNoesis 6y ago
It seems that it's more a problem with your inability to optimize correctly than anything else. But you are on the right way. You are trying to do a multiple-objective optimization one objective at a time, and cycling through them. You have already noticed that you can't totally forget the other objectives when working on one, otherwise you lose more over a cycle. In fact what you seem to be aiming for is a single objective which is a combination of being good at work, soccer and relationship. At first order (i.e. when you don't aim for reaping the non-linear effects of being "the best" and ignore the non-linear effects in human physiology), the optimal optimization shouldn't exhibit such oscillations. Quantify it, put it into a solver and do what's told. But the rule of thumb of good optimization (something something Jensen inequality) is that all your objectives must be growing all the time so you just have to be sure you are not letting something regress. It's called striking a balance. Then all objectives will grow following a S-curve simultaneously. To avoid local minima (i.e. plateaus) which often plague single optimization problems, just increase the number of degree of freedoms in your internal representation and add some variability. Play various styles, try another way of working, spice up your relationships, do this simultaneously, memorize and imagine, and of course don't forget to try to improve (i.e. "pick the right move", as it's easy to just enjoy the fun of variability). That's when the jack of all trade begin to reap benefit over the master of one. Some activities do synergize and help you progress deeper and faster. Closely related is the eternal debate between satisficer vs maximizer which is just the primal-dual representation of the optimization problem.
- AgentMatt 6y ago
  > But the rule of thumb of good optimization (something something Jensen inequality) is that all your objectives must be growing all the time so you just have to be sure you are not letting something regress. It's called striking a balance. Then all objectives will grow following a S-curve simultaneously. Does this assume no cost for context switching? When I have tried to juggle several objectives in my life, I often have regressions in the ones I don't focus on at the time. For example, after focusing on working out for a while, I may lose interest and not follow an "optimal maintenance" regimen, meaning my abilities decay below their peak. I don't feel too bad about it, and use muscle memory as justification: when I return to the activity, I will get back to my peak much quicker then when I first got there. Doing so allows me to extend the time before I have to refocus on that activity again. (But maybe that's suboptimal in the sense that I pushed myself too hard initially, so I am fed up with that activity and don't feel like doing maintenance at all.) > Closely related is the eternal debate between satisficer vs maximizer which is just the primal-dual representation of the optimization problem. Can you elaborate on this?
yomly 6y ago
Yes my findings match yours. "Gains" take much more focus and dedication than just showing up. That is true for muscle mass, performance, side projects and learning.
nicbou 6y ago
> *eg: once you reached a desirable physical shape, you can switch to 'maintain mode', and focus your energies to something new It should be noted that this does not apply to intimate relationships. They cannot be shelved and picked up again as you see fit. They require consistency. I have made the mistake of putting relationships in maintenance mode, and it did not work so well.
runawaybottle 6y ago
Whenever I get a new job I optimize for work and stop fitness for awhile. It’s a lot of load to focus on work, and also skip eating what I want (iced coffees, whatever lunch is nearby, etc). I also just want to skip the gym. I never introduce fitness again until I settle into a new position. This is just optimal for me in terms of dealing with stress. It’s kind of like refactoring code in a new codebase, takes awhile to settle in and figure out the new routine.
jasonv 6y ago
When I truly committed to my fitness goals, my work improved significantly. But I simplified the rest of my life. To some people my life looked really, really boring... to me, it was just right. At the moment I'm doing too many things. By conventional measures, I'm doing notably well, especially given the present circumstances. But I need to do a bit less to be even happier, and aligned with the levels of my commitments.
theironlily 6y ago
or, you’re like me if you imagine yourself to be this person who’s good at all the things, and become exhausted just thinking about it...
ChefboyOG 6y ago
Anecdotally, I find this to be spot on. One thing I'll add that has been important for me is identifying what "maintenance mode" looks like for different areas. For instance, I'm in "ambitious project phase", so I put some upfront work into figuring out a somewhat mindless 30-60 minute daily fitness routine, what a maintenance amount of socializing looks like, etc. When I was younger, I was very bad at establishing this baseline for things that weren't as easily quantifiable (like fitness) and it led to some stressful times.
xwdv 6y ago
> It is very hard to work on your project at home, when you are in a intense bulking, or 'cutting' phase, and once you come home form the gym you just want to chill.... Zero excuse for this IMO. A work out of 1 hour is good enough and it’s only 4% of a day. Muscle growth happens when you sleep, so allocate 7 hours. Eating meals to bulk up isn’t hard. Drink 30g protein shake with each meal, on top of the protein you get from your meals (another 30g or so) and you should be able to meet daily protein requirements (0.8-1g protein per day per pound of body weight). Then just make sure you’re getting the carbs and fats you require. It’s easy, but there’s a catch. Your wrist size will be and indicator of how much muscle you can pack on your frame without steroids. If you don’t have big fat bones for your wrists then forget it your body’s bone structure does not provide enough surface area to attach as much muscle as you’d probably like. You will never be big naturally, so just focus on being lean.
- metal13 6y ago
  OP said bulking or cutting. Bulking is easier from an energy standpoint (compared to cutting), but it's not trivial. Your body is still tired. Your capacity for problem solving is still limited. And eating (and buying, and prepping) the amount of food needed for bulking is time consuming. And cutting is even worse. You feel drained. And you sleep more when cutting then you did when bulking. Both are hard enough that it makes me wonder if you've done either for a decent period of time. If you had, it'd be pretty easy to see OP's point without a flippant answer that ignores what they're saying.
  - xwdv 6y ago
    I consulted a nutritionist and had most meals prepped and delivered, so I eliminated wasted time.
    - metal13 6y ago
      I mean, good for you to have that ability. > "Zero excuse for this IMO." So, zero excuse, as long you have the money to pay someone to do all the thinking/planning for you. And as long as you have the money (and live in the right locations) to have someone do all the actual work of cooking for you. I also suggest you go read the commenting guidelines, especially the "assume good faith" piece: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
soneca 6y ago
I think similarly. I have this heuristics that my life priorities occupy a decreasing amount of my attention, cutting in half by each priority level. I consider personal life, like time to family, friends, out of this system. I am including here things that I must focus on doing properly to improve myself and my life in a number of dimensions. Goes like this, priority #1 gets 50% of your attention, #2 gets 25%, #3 gets 12.5%, #4 6.25, #5 ~3% (which in practice, rounds down to zero most of times, so for #5 and beyond I effectively equal to 0%). I define "attention" as a loose mix of your time and your mind space. So if you have a day job, kind of by definition it's your #1 priority. No matter how much you hate it, consider unimportant, or think you are neglecting it, you are still 8 hours of your day doing that, so it's your #1 attention priority. It has 50% of your attention. My current #2 is my side-project that I hope to earn enough money to become my day-job and #1. Freeing space for other things I want to do (coincidentally enough, also reading books and playing soccer)
SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
I schedule things. I happened to use google Calendar, but the choice is unimportant. Block out time as busy: work, commute, gym, cooking, eating, sleeping, whatever. Pick the amount of practice needed for the desired target activity. It's quite clear when you can't add something new, and it's clear from progress in things when you need to shift. Some things take less to maintain than others. It also makes doing things you want easy, and helps build habits. "Willpower doesn't work, habits do. Motivation doesn't work, planning does." is true in my experience.
ashtonkem 6y ago
Simplified into something I say a lot: “opportunity cost waits for no man”.
lisper 6y ago
> It is impossible to be really good at everything That's true, but it is possible to acquire "meta-skills" which make it easier to acquire new skills. Someone with good meta-skills, like the ability to focus, or the ability to quickly triage what things ought to be optimized, or even just knowing what one really wants out of life, can get a lot better at more things than someone without them.
Taylor_OD 6y ago
It's frustrating that life is like a Sim's game. There are sliders that have to be managed and you can only keep so many full at once. Often one or more will dip to keep others full.
KerryJones 6y ago
This has been my experience as well. I find it interesting that I've been given many compliments in life for "how good I am at so many things" -- but it's all come down to this rotation. I dive very, very deeply into an activity for a few months or year and get to a point where my maintenance-mode is higher than other people's "high" point. Sometimes I cycle these, I've gone to fitness a number of times and hit some incredible goals, then go to photography, then to dancing, then back to fitness. It _does_ mean that I try to optimize my activities to be inclusive -- if I can do an activity that both keeps me physically fit and provides social benefit, and has the potential for extra income -- I might stick with it longer. I also favor activities that give me lasting benefit when I am not paying attention, such as investing, photography, or writing (all of which continue to exist or build money or followers when I stop). This allows me to focus in other areas while still "growing" in a different field.
dingaling 6y ago
Cutting & bulking is not fitness, it's muscle building for appearance and status. A good level of fitness can be achieved and maintained with an hour of separate core and aerobic exercise per day. You might not look like the guys in Men's Health but you'll probably swim a hell of a lot better than them.
- pluto9 6y ago
  There's more than one kind of fitness. Bulking and cutting optimizes for maximum power-to-weight ratio. I won't deny that there's an element of vanity to it, as there is with any effort to be fit, but that doesn't make it "not fitness". To borrow your phrasing, someone who follows GP's program instead of yours might not swim as well as you, but they're probably a hell of a lot stronger.
rebuilder 6y ago
I've had pretty good results fitting both physical training and work, at least, into the day. 1 hour a day, 6 days a week, of training. Every other day is submaximal strength training with an undulating periodization model, every other day is conditioning. The latter workouts rarely take more than 30 minutes, so there's time for some body maintenance. I do pretty much the same type of thing each weekday, with a set progression plan that I review every 6 weeks. I don't need to fret about what I'm going to be doing each day, I just go and do it when it's time, and then it's done. This is new because I definitely used to have a hard time getting serious about anything other than training. I think learning to program in such a way that I don't actively dread the workouts, and that I'm still functional the next day, has been key here.

jimbob45 6y ago

It's not impossible...but it requires strict time management and everyone else in your life will try to steal your earmarked time and complain that you never want to do anything. Even then, I agree - I'm constantly accidentally over prioritizing and having to even back out.

llamataboot 6y ago
I find it's much better to always do whatever I want to do, and if I find out I'm not doing what I want to be doing even if I'm doing whatever I want to do, inquire into what sort of crazy thing led me to believe I wanted to do X while I was doing Y because I wanted to do Y. Conscious hedonism is the only way to live, but you better be willing to be conscious, cause doing what you "want" sucks until you get good at it.
ardit33 6y ago
yeah, it is physically impossible.... I gave you two disciplines: bulking up in the gym, or playing soccer... while bulking up, you gain both muscle and some fat, and your soccer performance will suffer as your weight will increase, and your larger biceps and pecs really wont help your soccer game much (there is a reason that pro soccer players don't look like body builders). Also playing lots of soccer will hurt your 'gains'. (too much cardio is a 'gains' killer). On the other side, while 'cutting', to be leaner, you are running on a calorie deficit for multiple weeks, or months, and your soccer performance will suffer since you are so glycogen depleted..... You can be good at both, but not the "best you can be" at both disciplines at the same time as optimizing for one, will hurt your other one, and that's just physics. Hope that makes sense....
- momentbruh 6y ago
  You are not going to be the best you can be at anything, unless you focus on it every waking hour of the week. Let go of that illusion and training things concurrently is a lot less anxiety-inducing.
- inertiatic 6y ago
  That's almost entirely broscience. Being at a slight deficit won't hurt your soccer performance. You're not a top tier professional that needs to optimize for every tiny thing. Even if you are, Ronaldo is shredded and is a top 5 footballer. And most footballers are naturally very lean, so what you're saying doesn't even make empirical sense. Should you expect to play the Champion's League finals while preparing to do poses at a bodybuilding show and do your best? No, but you could conceivably do these a few weeks apart. Cardiovascular activity won't "kill your gains", there's no such consensus, you just have to be smart about your caloric intake. There's no physical law involved here so saying it's "just physics" sounds very dismissive.
  - pawelmurias 6y ago
    Pro body building is built around taking insane amounts of roids which will get you caught during drug testing in pro soccer.
watwut 6y ago
> everyone else in your life will try to steal your earmarked time and complain that you never want to do anything. That is good phase. The bad phase is when those people eventually disappear and you have hard time to connect with anyone new.
onion2k 6y ago
everyone else in your life will try to steal your earmarked time and complain that you never want to do anything Being able to say "No", and being willing to let people down because there are things you need to do that are more important than them, is a really important skill when you're running a startup. You can't succeed if you're giving up all your time to other people's things. You have to stop and tell them you won't do what they're asking because you're focusing on your own stuff. They will complain. Some of them will stop talking to you. You might really annoy your family. Your real friends will understand and still be there when you're finished. Some of them might happily come along and help you with what you're doing.
- hef19898 6y ago
  You are dscribing a perfect way for an early burn-out and a lonely life. Relationships are one of the most important things in life, and I say this as a guy who could litteraly not talk to anyone for two weeks strait. It's relationships with people that get you your first customers for your start-up, your key employees. relationships keep you down to earth, friends and fmily. The latter being one of the most important elements in your life, your kids and spouse. Why am I saying this? Because relationships go both ways. When you care about people, chances are some of them will care about you as well. And if you don't really care about your customers, your company is screwed anyway. Granted, everyone has a different bandwidth to handle these relationships, and seperating the toxic ones from the rest is problem. Which makes relationships all the more important.
  - onion2k 6y ago
    I didn't say that you should say no to everything. I said you should develop the ability to say no to things that you don't want to do because you have more important things to spend your time on. Trying to make everyone around you happy by giving up time you want to spend on important things is a much quicker route to burn out than declining some meetings you don't care about.
    - ct520 6y ago
      I hate to say amongst the commenters I don’t think your opinion is a popular one here. I agree with you.
ct520 6y ago
Optimize, prioritize, delegate, outsource. Not impossible at all. Learning to balance it takes time. But I assure people it can be done and I’m proof.

nmfisher 6y ago

I think you hit the nail on the head. It's good advice, particularly if you're someone with a short attention span who's constantly jumping from project to project. Nowadays, it's so easy to see just how far the talent pool is across the globe. You see the awesome cello player on Instagram, the amazing 3D games artist on Twitter, the world class gymnast on TikTok. You get so excited and inspired, and naturally, you want to be able to do the same. But you can't pick up three things at once. Those people are exceptional because they focused on one thing - and only one thing only - for a long time. You only see what they produce, not the countless years of practice and frustration and experimentation that it took for them to get there. That's not saying you can't get good at multiple things. But particularly for adults (who have far less free time than children), you are much better off concentrating on a single "improvement" goal at any one time. Maintain your other skills, sure, but accept that other people will overtake you in those areas. If you try and compete with everyone at everything, you'll just end up losing.

toyg 6y ago
Indeed. Also, nobody posts their failures online. You only see success, and the path to that success is hidden or even misrepresented (“I made this in an afternoon!” ... and 5 years working 8h/day on the necessary skills).
- tonyarkles 6y ago
  I've started to make a conscious effort to post about my failures on Twitter specifically to help address that a bit, especially when they're hilariously bad (e.g. crashing a model airplane 3 seconds into its flight). Naturally, I've been failing at doing this consistently :)
  - robotnikman 6y ago
    I'm starting to find that people making posts about their failures offer me more value than people who post about their success. Reading them usually helps me be less hard on myself, and also sometimes provide insights into how to avoid such pitfalls myself in the future

wiradikusuma 6y ago

..while having family/kids (but when you have them, your priority usually shifts anyway, so not a bad thing)

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

mikekchar 6y ago

I have a "rule of 3". You can be quite good at 3 things (give or take). One of them will probably be your job. One will probably be your relationships. You have time for 1 more. If you keep changing your mind about what that last one will be, then you will only be good at 2 things. There are ways to be good at only 1 thing as well.... or even 0...

grenoire 6y ago
Very much in line with my experience, but in fact for me it wasn't even 'being quite good at,' but just sufficiently managing and exceeding minimum expectations. In my college years that was, for example, studying, working, and managing the faculty magazine. I had no time to give to friends or socialise even. Relationships are definitely taking up one of these 'slots,' so to say.
cambalache 6y ago
A "thing" is just such a vague and general concept that is useless. If either your job or your relationships can be reduced to only mastering 1 thing I really envy you. If you say I am being unfair and of course it involves many sub-tasks , so why dont just choose to be good at life? So you can concentrate in just one thing and still have 2 other "things" to spare. Now, less snarky and more serious, in any activity or discipline you choose, there are people who are dedicating their whole life to it, so you have 3 options.1) Hope your natural talent will compensate the less hours you dedicate to it (this is almost always false). 2) Accept you will never be as good as the crazies who spend all of their time on it.3)Join the fray and invest all your time on it. Almost all great creations in humanity, things like Einstein's theory of relativity, Dante's Divine Comedy, Egypt's pyramids are the result of incredible and exclusive dedication for many many years.
- mikekchar 6y ago
  What you say is absolutely correct ;-) However, I still find it useful to think in these terms. For example, I'm working on a game in my spare time and streaming (most of it) on Twitch. But I'm also making cheese and doing a lot of research for it. I keep thinking of writing a book about cheesemaking because the information available to normal people is by and large pretty awful. So I think to myself, "Are you willing to give up your game in order to write your book?" And the answer is, no. I may slowly write a few things here or there, though (just to reduce the amount of time I spend answering questions on reddit!) But I think a book would be a very bad idea for me even though it is sooo tempting.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

I've never thought of myself as being particularly "gritty" in anything; for me personally, mediocrity is good enough. I'm boring in that I get up and go to bed at reasonable times, in that I play video games for a couple hours at most, then I think I've had enough. I'm not trying to humblebrag, it's not something I do conscientiously, my main point here is that not excelling, not "doing your best" is also fine. In agile methodologies the phrase "sustainable pace" is a recurring theme. You'll be in this life for 80 years if you're lucky, no need to burn through all that in a few years. I've worked for nearly ten years at my previous company (consultancy), the most dedicated, hardworking people all ended up with burnout. I mean sure, I guess they earned a bit more money and stuff, but they also spent at least six months up to a year completely out of action, some went straight back into it and had to be put out of action again. And I hope they ask themselves "was it worth it".

puranjay 6y ago
This sort of "marathon" thinking isn't appreciated enough. You'll learn and do more with 10 hours/week of something for 10 years than 60 hours/week of something for 6 months. The latter severely underestimates the long term cognitive and sheer physical burden of intense effort. Unless you are pursuing something that has an age or time factor (say, professional sports), I truly believe it's better to be a "marathon runner" than a "sprinter" when it comes to learning
- chepaslaaa 6y ago
  Most professional athletes have about 20 years of practice before peaking (maybe around 15 in sports where the athletes peak younger such as gymnastics). When you see Eliud Kipchoge or Alex Honnold's achievements in their 30s being celebrated, you don't see them at 15 years old at regional competitions being average-among-the-decent.
CalRobert 6y ago
Unfortunately those same people also push others (or worse, their direct reports) to burn out as fast or faster than themselves.
6y ago

Keloo 6y ago

This remind me of the Howard Marks 'Economic Reality' essay. https://www.oaktreecapital.com/docs/default-source/memos/economic-reality.pdf https://www.oaktreecapital.com/docs/default-source/memos/eco...

CalRobert 6y ago

Then you have a kid and realize just how much free time you actually had...

olau 6y ago
Hah, that actually works more than once, as in "Then you have a(nother) kid and realize just how much free time you actually had".
- jahn716 6y ago
  It only took two for me to learn my lesson haha
- bluGill 6y ago
  As kids get older they take time differently. Just had my third kid and I notice a great difference in how time is used. My 6 year old is happy to spend time with my playing openttd (how he plays is interesting to an adult), and I go do something else at the same time. The baby needs me to hold her all the time and so I can't really do anything.
- CalRobert 6y ago
  Every night I think "hey I ought to hack on that little side project" after the 2 year old goes to bed but then the 6 month old wants to be held and cuddled and there's no way I'm telling her no so I can go work on a Scrapy project. It can wait.

xz0r 6y ago

I'd argue, its not impossible. There might be people who are able to manage everything, we just don't know.

GistNoesis 6y ago

It seems that it's more a problem with your inability to optimize correctly than anything else. But you are on the right way. You are trying to do a multiple-objective optimization one objective at a time, and cycling through them. You have already noticed that you can't totally forget the other objectives when working on one, otherwise you lose more over a cycle. In fact what you seem to be aiming for is a single objective which is a combination of being good at work, soccer and relationship. At first order (i.e. when you don't aim for reaping the non-linear effects of being "the best" and ignore the non-linear effects in human physiology), the optimal optimization shouldn't exhibit such oscillations. Quantify it, put it into a solver and do what's told. But the rule of thumb of good optimization (something something Jensen inequality) is that all your objectives must be growing all the time so you just have to be sure you are not letting something regress. It's called striking a balance. Then all objectives will grow following a S-curve simultaneously. To avoid local minima (i.e. plateaus) which often plague single optimization problems, just increase the number of degree of freedoms in your internal representation and add some variability. Play various styles, try another way of working, spice up your relationships, do this simultaneously, memorize and imagine, and of course don't forget to try to improve (i.e. "pick the right move", as it's easy to just enjoy the fun of variability). That's when the jack of all trade begin to reap benefit over the master of one. Some activities do synergize and help you progress deeper and faster. Closely related is the eternal debate between satisficer vs maximizer which is just the primal-dual representation of the optimization problem.

AgentMatt 6y ago
> But the rule of thumb of good optimization (something something Jensen inequality) is that all your objectives must be growing all the time so you just have to be sure you are not letting something regress. It's called striking a balance. Then all objectives will grow following a S-curve simultaneously. Does this assume no cost for context switching? When I have tried to juggle several objectives in my life, I often have regressions in the ones I don't focus on at the time. For example, after focusing on working out for a while, I may lose interest and not follow an "optimal maintenance" regimen, meaning my abilities decay below their peak. I don't feel too bad about it, and use muscle memory as justification: when I return to the activity, I will get back to my peak much quicker then when I first got there. Doing so allows me to extend the time before I have to refocus on that activity again. (But maybe that's suboptimal in the sense that I pushed myself too hard initially, so I am fed up with that activity and don't feel like doing maintenance at all.) > Closely related is the eternal debate between satisficer vs maximizer which is just the primal-dual representation of the optimization problem. Can you elaborate on this?

yomly 6y ago

Yes my findings match yours. "Gains" take much more focus and dedication than just showing up. That is true for muscle mass, performance, side projects and learning.

nicbou 6y ago

> *eg: once you reached a desirable physical shape, you can switch to 'maintain mode', and focus your energies to something new It should be noted that this does not apply to intimate relationships. They cannot be shelved and picked up again as you see fit. They require consistency. I have made the mistake of putting relationships in maintenance mode, and it did not work so well.

runawaybottle 6y ago

Whenever I get a new job I optimize for work and stop fitness for awhile. It’s a lot of load to focus on work, and also skip eating what I want (iced coffees, whatever lunch is nearby, etc). I also just want to skip the gym. I never introduce fitness again until I settle into a new position. This is just optimal for me in terms of dealing with stress. It’s kind of like refactoring code in a new codebase, takes awhile to settle in and figure out the new routine.

jasonv 6y ago

When I truly committed to my fitness goals, my work improved significantly. But I simplified the rest of my life. To some people my life looked really, really boring... to me, it was just right. At the moment I'm doing too many things. By conventional measures, I'm doing notably well, especially given the present circumstances. But I need to do a bit less to be even happier, and aligned with the levels of my commitments.

theironlily 6y ago

or, you’re like me if you imagine yourself to be this person who’s good at all the things, and become exhausted just thinking about it...

ChefboyOG 6y ago

Anecdotally, I find this to be spot on. One thing I'll add that has been important for me is identifying what "maintenance mode" looks like for different areas. For instance, I'm in "ambitious project phase", so I put some upfront work into figuring out a somewhat mindless 30-60 minute daily fitness routine, what a maintenance amount of socializing looks like, etc. When I was younger, I was very bad at establishing this baseline for things that weren't as easily quantifiable (like fitness) and it led to some stressful times.

xwdv 6y ago

> It is very hard to work on your project at home, when you are in a intense bulking, or 'cutting' phase, and once you come home form the gym you just want to chill.... Zero excuse for this IMO. A work out of 1 hour is good enough and it’s only 4% of a day. Muscle growth happens when you sleep, so allocate 7 hours. Eating meals to bulk up isn’t hard. Drink 30g protein shake with each meal, on top of the protein you get from your meals (another 30g or so) and you should be able to meet daily protein requirements (0.8-1g protein per day per pound of body weight). Then just make sure you’re getting the carbs and fats you require. It’s easy, but there’s a catch. Your wrist size will be and indicator of how much muscle you can pack on your frame without steroids. If you don’t have big fat bones for your wrists then forget it your body’s bone structure does not provide enough surface area to attach as much muscle as you’d probably like. You will never be big naturally, so just focus on being lean.

metal13 6y ago
OP said bulking or cutting. Bulking is easier from an energy standpoint (compared to cutting), but it's not trivial. Your body is still tired. Your capacity for problem solving is still limited. And eating (and buying, and prepping) the amount of food needed for bulking is time consuming. And cutting is even worse. You feel drained. And you sleep more when cutting then you did when bulking. Both are hard enough that it makes me wonder if you've done either for a decent period of time. If you had, it'd be pretty easy to see OP's point without a flippant answer that ignores what they're saying.
- xwdv 6y ago
  I consulted a nutritionist and had most meals prepped and delivered, so I eliminated wasted time.
  - metal13 6y ago
    I mean, good for you to have that ability. > "Zero excuse for this IMO." So, zero excuse, as long you have the money to pay someone to do all the thinking/planning for you. And as long as you have the money (and live in the right locations) to have someone do all the actual work of cooking for you. I also suggest you go read the commenting guidelines, especially the "assume good faith" piece: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

soneca 6y ago

I think similarly. I have this heuristics that my life priorities occupy a decreasing amount of my attention, cutting in half by each priority level. I consider personal life, like time to family, friends, out of this system. I am including here things that I must focus on doing properly to improve myself and my life in a number of dimensions. Goes like this, priority #1 gets 50% of your attention, #2 gets 25%, #3 gets 12.5%, #4 6.25, #5 ~3% (which in practice, rounds down to zero most of times, so for #5 and beyond I effectively equal to 0%). I define "attention" as a loose mix of your time and your mind space. So if you have a day job, kind of by definition it's your #1 priority. No matter how much you hate it, consider unimportant, or think you are neglecting it, you are still 8 hours of your day doing that, so it's your #1 attention priority. It has 50% of your attention. My current #2 is my side-project that I hope to earn enough money to become my day-job and #1. Freeing space for other things I want to do (coincidentally enough, also reading books and playing soccer)

SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago

I schedule things. I happened to use google Calendar, but the choice is unimportant. Block out time as busy: work, commute, gym, cooking, eating, sleeping, whatever. Pick the amount of practice needed for the desired target activity. It's quite clear when you can't add something new, and it's clear from progress in things when you need to shift. Some things take less to maintain than others. It also makes doing things you want easy, and helps build habits. "Willpower doesn't work, habits do. Motivation doesn't work, planning does." is true in my experience.

ashtonkem 6y ago

Simplified into something I say a lot: “opportunity cost waits for no man”.

lisper 6y ago

> It is impossible to be really good at everything That's true, but it is possible to acquire "meta-skills" which make it easier to acquire new skills. Someone with good meta-skills, like the ability to focus, or the ability to quickly triage what things ought to be optimized, or even just knowing what one really wants out of life, can get a lot better at more things than someone without them.

Taylor_OD 6y ago

It's frustrating that life is like a Sim's game. There are sliders that have to be managed and you can only keep so many full at once. Often one or more will dip to keep others full.

KerryJones 6y ago

This has been my experience as well. I find it interesting that I've been given many compliments in life for "how good I am at so many things" -- but it's all come down to this rotation. I dive very, very deeply into an activity for a few months or year and get to a point where my maintenance-mode is higher than other people's "high" point. Sometimes I cycle these, I've gone to fitness a number of times and hit some incredible goals, then go to photography, then to dancing, then back to fitness. It _does_ mean that I try to optimize my activities to be inclusive -- if I can do an activity that both keeps me physically fit and provides social benefit, and has the potential for extra income -- I might stick with it longer. I also favor activities that give me lasting benefit when I am not paying attention, such as investing, photography, or writing (all of which continue to exist or build money or followers when I stop). This allows me to focus in other areas while still "growing" in a different field.

dingaling 6y ago

Cutting & bulking is not fitness, it's muscle building for appearance and status. A good level of fitness can be achieved and maintained with an hour of separate core and aerobic exercise per day. You might not look like the guys in Men's Health but you'll probably swim a hell of a lot better than them.

pluto9 6y ago
There's more than one kind of fitness. Bulking and cutting optimizes for maximum power-to-weight ratio. I won't deny that there's an element of vanity to it, as there is with any effort to be fit, but that doesn't make it "not fitness". To borrow your phrasing, someone who follows GP's program instead of yours might not swim as well as you, but they're probably a hell of a lot stronger.

rebuilder 6y ago

I've had pretty good results fitting both physical training and work, at least, into the day. 1 hour a day, 6 days a week, of training. Every other day is submaximal strength training with an undulating periodization model, every other day is conditioning. The latter workouts rarely take more than 30 minutes, so there's time for some body maintenance. I do pretty much the same type of thing each weekday, with a set progression plan that I review every 6 weeks. I don't need to fret about what I'm going to be doing each day, I just go and do it when it's time, and then it's done. This is new because I definitely used to have a hard time getting serious about anything other than training. I think learning to program in such a way that I don't actively dread the workouts, and that I'm still functional the next day, has been key here.