Here are a list of things you can do so that you’ll never be truly, truly exceptional or standout at anything, but you’ll be mediocre to decent at a lot of things:

First, don’t stick with anything for too long. Dive into it enough to learn the fundamentals, but don’t spend any more time than you need to to get a solid grasp. Then jump to something else.

Find an expert mentor to speed up the learning curve, but definitely don’t seek out more than one. This way you’ll be able to take advantage of all the expertise they’ve accumulated over the years, but you won’t have to undertake synthesizing multiple opinions and experiences into your own approach.

Jump from one domain into a completely diverse and different domain, that is as unrelated as possible. In that way you won’t be able to directly connect dots that are similar in adjacent domains. Of course, subconsciously your brain will probably do some lateral thinking to connect it anyway, but you won’t have to spend any energy on it.

Practice the least you can get away with to develop and maintain the skill, but no more. Definitely set aside the skill entirely for periods of time. You won’t have that razor sharp edge when you come back to it, but then again you’ll find that you’ve maintained the majority of the ability.

Seek out and purchase books or programs created by experts. Any (good) program will necessarily be a limited view and subset of an expert’s total experience that leaves lots of things out. Borrowing their approach means you’ll be able to get results that are usually pretty close to what they can do at least in that limited scope, but you probably won’t understand how you got there and be able to widen that approach – at least not at first.

Don’t attach your identity to any one particular thing. Even though it can be energetically and mentally costly, identifying as someone who is an exceptional athlete or say painter can further drive that desire to improve and act in accordance with your identity. So if you don’t want to focus on only one thing, don’t attach yourself rigidly to that identity. Of course that leaves you with the flexibility to change directions without having struggles about identity…

If you follow these general principles you will very likely be able to succeed at not becoming the very best in the world at any one single thing.

On the other hand, you’d be able to build an incredibly wide variety of skills to a level where you could apply them productively and usefully. You’d also probably come up with your own ingenious approaches and solutions to things because of the breadth of your skills and abilities and the ability to connect disparate things.

Maybe there’s actually something to that.

The other day I was playing around in Photoshop working on digitizing some art that Jen had created on paper with charcoal. Besides converting it to a digital medium, we also wanted to use it in a place that doesn’t lend well to the intricate differentiation of strokes and shading inherent in charcoal art. So I was playing around with cleaning up the design to align better with the medium.

But in doing so, I realized there were tons of little judgement calls to make. Do I make that tiny stroke wider, or do I eliminate it completely? What about this slightly darker shaded section?

There isn’t a correct answer. Even if there are only two possible options, either one could “work”, they’d just look a little different. Not right, not even better, just different.

You might be thinking, duh David, that’s the beauty of art.

And to that I’d say duh, but how often are you exercising that choice between two or more equally valid decisions each of which creates a different but not objectively better outcome?

More and more and more our lives are algorithmically and rationally determined.

Enlightenment rationalism, the school of thought that almost all of our current thinking descends from, is a a way of thinking that questions can be answered in very robust mathematical, logical, “rational” ways and the answer you will come up with will be something close to, if not the, empirical truth.

Hoo boy.

People dedicate their lives to studying and unpacking this stuff, but let’s just look at one slice.

Chances are extremely good that at some point today you will make a food choice based a rationalization derived from scientific study. Maybe you pass up coffee because of some cancer association. Or you’ll eat a certain food because you’ve been led to believe, by empirical evidence, that it’s cardio-protective.

And that choice, in a real sense, was pre-determined by that rationalization that was provided to you completely external of yourself. You didn’t choose it. The mental model you’ve subscribed to made it so that it was the only choice you could have possibly made – given the evidence.

Here’s another example of faux rationality that is fed to you, that is very topical as I write this email. Every time you login to Facebook you are fed a stream of things that the algorithm has determined, optimized through the precision of mathematics of course, are things you want to see. They are empirically correct by this standard of thinking.

I don’t know about you, but when I login to Facebook most of what I see makes me want to vomit, so that doesn’t seem to be working out so well.

It’s almost like when you optimize for any single thing, through a limited lens, you don’t get an overall, holistic great result.

This pervasive idea of what is “best” or “optimal” is especially endemic to physical training. People always want the optimal program or exercise. The reality is that even if there were an optimal, it would be a moving target that could only be determined in the moment. Biofeedback, incidentally, is the best and most accurate way I know of to get real-time feedback taken as a whole, comprising all the individually indiscernible variables, that you can act on in your training to make adjustments.

But when it comes down to it creating a good program is a lot more art than it is science. There are many many ways to come up with a program that achieves the desired end. Sure, there are best practices that have been studied and we’ve got reasonable certainty that we understand what’s going on with those individual things. But if you tried to piece together a program using only pure rationalism, you’d end up with a garbage program if it was even complete at all.

All of this incredibly myopic thinking is given the veneer of being the closest we can get to the truth, when it fact rationalism only obscures the complexity that’s actually involved!

And so, art and the act of creation in many ways is an antidote to the poison in the dose of only approaching everything through the lens of rationalism.

What I want for you is to explore more art and creativity. Go make things. Learn a new skill as a way to express yourself. It’ll make you better, in every imaginable way.

Have you ever heard of the HALT acronym and principle?

It stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired.

The idea is that if you are any of these things, you should stop before you do anything rash.

By itself it’s a pretty good principle and form of biofeedback. It prompts you to check in with yourself, and the state of your body before you make some rash, destructive, or otherwise harmful action or decision. I think we can all agree that you’re never going to be at your best when you’re hungry, angry, lonely, or tired.

There’s a bigger principle to take away from it though. You don’t have to limit your checking-in on your state to those four states.

All of your states affect your actions. You could be sad, scared, proud, embarrassed, worried and so on.

And the most important thing you can ever do is to reconcile your state before you do anything else.

Sometimes that means taking the same action you would have taken regardless. An example would be if you’re on your way to work out but you’re really angry about work.

Are you a person for whom working out is a good way to work through emotions like anger, in a positive way? Then taking the action of doing the workout is what you’d do to reconcile your state.

But, if you’re a person for whom an angry workout is just one more spin into a downward spiral of getting more angry and frustrated you must do something else first.

You have to care of your state before your action.

I wrote much more about this with how it relates to stress and how you react to it, if you’re interested, in a piece here.

But the takeaway I want for you today is to think about how you’re feeling at every inflection point before you take a different action, and check in on your state. Sometimes you can just keep going forward. But sometimes you’re going to need to fix your state, first.