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.

“But you did that in thirty seconds,” the astonished woman replied.

“No,” Picasso said. “It has taken me forty years to do that.”"

Apocryphal or not, the point of the arduous and often frustrating process hiding behind the product is relevant to any skill.

It's stupid, but I'm guilty of it too. I am trying to catch myself, though. It's easier to be more candid once you start having a bit of success.

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.

For example, it's only been fairly recent since I dared to claim I'm pretty good at programming. And not even all aspects of it, but there are some aspects where I really notice I'm better at it than my co-workers. I've been doing this professionally for 20 years, so I guess it's about time I got good at it.

I've always thought I was pretty good at sailing; I think I have a talent for it. Used to do it a lot back in the day, but haven't been able to sail much in recent years. I'm not doing the upkeep, but I don't think I forgot any of it. I think I can jump in a boat and sail safely while teaching someone else. I don't think sailing costs nearly as much upkeep as something like physical fitness, which drops pretty quickly once you stop exercising.

I'm good at cycling, but doing the upkeep for this is easy: just take the bike when you go anywhere. I'm not as fast as when I was younger, but still faster than most.

I've been playing RPGs all my life, but I think I only recently got good at GMing (I've done it plenty of times before, but it was very hit and miss, and the misses sucked bad). But that's something I've been putting a lot of time and effort in lately. I clearly don't have any natural talent for it, but I've managed to accumulate quite a bit of experience over the decades. I still lack the discipline to do thorough prep, but experience fills in a lot of the details.

Despite having played a ton of different instruments (drums, keyboard, guitar), I've never gotten good at music. I lacked the discipline to practice every day, and though I would like to be better at it, I'm clearly not as passionate about it as I am about gaming.

For example, let’s say that you play piano, and you push yourself to a new level of skill and learn a few more advanced pieces. The decay rate for that skill is quite long, and with a very minimal level of work you can keep those pieces fresh for years or decades.

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".

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

Truth be told, you hit the nail on the head for me, at all the different levels of the issue that you covered. As the years go by I feel more and more grateful that I'm still alive, and though I didn't do as much as I should have in nurturing my relationships as a young man, I'm really grateful I either did just enough - or am plain lucky - to have relationships to which I can now give my time and attention.

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.

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?

I find that doing five minutes workout easily increases the amount of exercises I did for 40+ minutes a day. That's on top of my commitment to going to the gym and doing an hour worth of training.

Yep, that's what I think. If you are oscillating for no reason you are doing it wrong. That's typically the yoyo effect people often experience when optimizing for their weight.

Humans do a really poor job at optimization in general. Quite often following a simple PID for control just make these oscillations disappear, and allow the optimization to continue instead of being stuck.

This is a simple model (quadratic), so it has its limits. Context switching shouldn't be a problem. Ideally you would have a zero cost to context switch, but if the cost is non zero, it only increase the variance but you should reach still your optimum as long as you remember that you are not just optimizing for the task at hand but for the combination.

The other limitation is when you have non-linear effects, but they are usually adverse, meaning big oscillations are more likely to result in an injury, than in an acceleration in progress. But sometimes, they can be beneficial like avoiding over-adaptation.

>Can you elaborate on this?

Which brings me to the satisficer vs maximizer point. There are often two school of thoughts when you optimize a problem that has constraints.

Once the problem become more complicated some people will assume a simplistic model and go with it, while other will try to find the best one before going with it. General-structure oriented vs detail oriented.

You can stay in the primal representation where you respect the constraints, then improve while respecting the constraints. Or you can switch to the dual where you give yourself some slack in the constraint while occurring a cost for violating the constraint that you add to the objective. You can also stay within the admissible region using some barrier method.

When you are working in the dual you are already juggling with multiple objectives.

You try to satisfy the constraints simultaneously focusing on those actively being violated, usually once all constraints are satisfied you are happy and stop maximizing even though there is still something to grab. If you want to progress further, you give yourself some additional constraints and satisfy again. Basically you are trying to land in a good-enough(TM) region of space.

The maximizer will aim for the peak. He will optimize for the sake of it. Instead of expanding the problem to a more interesting one, he will try his best to grab that extra-performance point on its limited toy problem. Once he reached the optimal point he knows that he has some slack left and only then he expands the problem to another dimension.

Sometimes he finds that deep peak inside a shallow valley, but most often he is spending a lot of energy just to make the satisficer look bad.

I wonder if it's useful to incorporate Bayesian probability here to account for this. Like, I could start with my prior belief of what my fitness level would be given time/effort input, collect the data, then update my priors based on collected data. In theory, given enough time, the Bayesian method would have to converge on the right coefficients for your model.

You can probably find the optimal resource allocation strategy if you are well-versed in multi-armed bandit and reinforcement learning. But often just respecting general optimization principle is enough.

You can do some gradient descent on time/effort resource allocation per activity parameters. As long as you don't change these parameters too fast (which OP was doing), and have a way to evaluate your progress (you can use Bayesian estimates aka Kalman or particle Filter there to track those smoother non-observable states). You will be just fine. It's not rocket science and you need to have a way to internalize it so that it can become practical.

The simple heuristic I suggested was make sure you always progress in all activities you care about, and avoid common optimization pitfalls such as oscillations (i.e. lack of stability) and local minimas.

Those damn oscillations are a typical symptom of being too greedy when selecting the step size. You think you are not progressing fast enough so you make a big adjustments then lose all progress. You can probably converge faster by using some line search procedure to find the optimal step-size, but the conservative approach of not changing things too quickly (small step-size) and letting time do the the work is good enough.

Usually you also don't start from scratch, as you are already doing some activities and are near equilibrium. And you add another activity, you slowly increase the time/effort investment parameters for this activity while taking it from used resources and keeping the monitoring to make sure slow but consistent progress is still happening everywhere.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.oaktreecapital.com/docs/default-source/memos/eco...

That is good phase. The bad phase is when those people eventually disappear and you have hard time to connect with anyone new.

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....

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.

All these examples are very poor, bending reality to prove cliche folk wisdom, it’s actually kinda funny.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> "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