Comment by malvosenior | Hacker News Reader

Comment by malvosenior | Hacker News Reader

It's easy not to care how good you are at your hobbies when you're already really good at something else. It takes a tremendous amount of time and energy to really master something. There just isn't time in the day left over to master multiple things.

I'd like to think I'm pretty good at programming. I spend many hours a day doing it, have studied it for decades and pretty much have been completely obsessed with computers my whole life.

From that standpoint it's really nice for me to have a few hobbies that are much less intense and where I can be "not good" but just enjoy myself. The position this article takes.

That being said, if I wasn't an expert in my field, I may not be able to find that comfort in being middling at best in other areas. This I think is a lot of people's problem. The fear of failure (and in the west, anti-intellectual culture) stop people from even attempting to be great. Not at hobbies but at everything.

So I think the article is correct, but missing hobbies are a second order effect after missing primary passion.

> It's easy not to care how good you are at your hobbies when you're already really good at something else.

I've seen that at play, and it can be a very significant effect. The clearest instance from my personal experience was in self-studying mathematics. I began my regimen of study literally the day after finishing my CS degree. I'd had a 'repetitive strain injury' related to computer usage for years at that point, and had figured I would never be able to work as a programmer again (did a brief stint as a teenager). I needed to find something else and had been searching for a long time without luck—but now I had something: I'd just earn money doing mathematics somehow!

It was grueling to work on at that time because it seemed like my last option for being able to do something that used my creative/technical abilities as a career (I was working at a grocery store then to put things in perspective)—and I just had no idea if I was going to be good enough with math for it to be a realistic possibility. So it was nerve-wracking anytime I attempted something that would test my ability.

Several years later, after figuring out the computer use issues—I didn't need mathematics anymore. But I'd spent a lot of time learning, gaining proficiency, and developing interests in various areas; so at some point I got back into studying again. The difference is night and day—I'm far more productive, and it's just, by comparison to before, no big deal.

Highly recommended if you can settle it with yourself that you're okay with things however they turn out in relation to some hobby/skill/whatever.

What injury did you have? How did you solve it?

I could never get a doctor to give a precise answer to that, just, "some kind of repetitive strain injury." It seems to have had psychological components to it also: I was so worried about it that I created additional tension there and never let it relax, and I was always super stiff/tense while using the computer. So whatever new ergonomics or exercises I tried, I continued clenching/worrying whenever using a computer. And then I could see that the tension was making things worse so I'd get worried and more tense because of that which created a bad feedback effect.

Getting better was partly just learning to not freak out about it—the situation was manageable and I wasn't going to have to give up my favorite activity that I'd spent so much of my life training for etc.

More exercise, better ergonomics, and taking breaks also helped. I've been practicing meditation for a couple years now too, and it's finally been getting to the point where I can use what I've learned to see and modify the bad mental patterns I established during 10 years of unpleasant computer use (including getting out of the feedback effect mentioned above).

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