jthornquest

There are a lot of very good notes in these comments about our relationship with "work" and excellence. I currently operate from the perspective of creating something I'm proud of for myself, and I'm relearning the joy of leisure. My own life isn't defined by my greatness, my productivity, or my output. I've learned to realize that the "alarm-bells" that clattered in my head were more of an anxious, awful self-perception that my value was tied to my output.

A few weeks ago, I found a bit of recent scientific learning that gave me a renewed context around passion and pursuit. It turns out that research is showing that bodies and brains don't typically begin to degrade in their capacity for training muscle-memory skills until our sixties. For someone like me, who is anxiously accounting for how to try a lot of different pursuits (music, illustration, and especially relevant here, a constantly tenuous relationship with computers) this is a comfort. I was so motivated by a rush to get my foundations down by the time I was thirty, because the capitalist culture I'm steeped in says that's my deadline.

I had it ingrained that my teenage or twenty-something years were the time to plant the seeds, and it's all downhill after that. Besides the wisdom shared on the contrary (both in these comments and elsewhere), dipping this wisdom in research I didn't know about before empowered me further.

I appreciate that Paul adds a bit about how our focus doesn't often become clear until we're older, that our childhoods tend to distill topics in ways that can initially bland them to our taste. Nevertheless, I want to stress that you've got a lot more time to do something to your best ability. Even as you age beyond sixty or seventy, I've seen so many folks brush off the bit of extra physical or mental challenge that they face, and do great things anyway.

Your twenties won't make or break you. You have so much more time.