Comment by cambalache | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cambalache | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

Just blog. It's like a book, except you can stop whenever you want and you haven't lost anything. (That's what Eliezer Yudkowsky did, and those blog posts eventually became a book.)

Didn't Einstein had a day job at a patent office while developing the Theory of Relativity?

It's worth noting that much of his work at the patent office related to questions about transmission of electric signals and electrical–mechanical synchronization of time, two technical problems that show up conspicuously in the thought experiments that eventually led Einstein to his radical conclusions about the nature of light and the fundamental connection between space and time.

The special theory (among other goodies), but I am willing to bet nobody was investing more quality time at that problem at that year(Theoretical physics was a game played in a few European cities). For the General Theory he spent 10 years (1905-1915), he worked at the patent office until 1909, and even yet, he got almost scooped by Hilbert.

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