Comment by BobaFloutist
2 days ago
I've noticed that for most hobbies, there comes a point where to improve you need to do the boring part. Yes, to a certain extent, practice can be play, but unless you're the one-in-a-million prodigy who's just obsessed day and night, it's not going to be much fun drilling scales, or practicing your serve, or crimping on a hangboard, or whatever.
Once you get to a certain level, you stop being able to just easily add new skills and capabilities and have to cycle between adding skills and polishing skills. And once you get far enough, adding skills becomes a much smaller portion of time you spend on the activity than polishing, until one day you've mostly added all the skills you're going to and the only thing left to do is polish them to perfection.
And that's why I don't strive for excellence in most any of my hobbies -- they stop being as fun when I'm no longer getting to do new things and only ever pushing against my limit to improve things I'm already doing.
I don't know about that. I've only ever been properly good at one thing in my life - I'm a dilettante at everything else, including my current career - but in my experience (in common with even more talented artists with whom I've worked) is that the polishing is where the fun begins. You get to a point where you're working at such a finely detailed level that only you, and others equally invested, will ever notice, and you're pursuing perfection that you know isn't ever possible, but you get moments where it's just... Yes: that was it, and then you're chasing that feeling again. I dunno, there's maybe something egoistic about that, and you obviously have to really care about what you're working on, but I've never experienced anything else remotely as satisfying. I can easily imagine that generalizing to swimming, or writing code, or driving a racecar, or pretty much any other activity that humans engage in.