dabbling

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the idea of dabbling.

There is value in the trying.

What is failure, after all?

By my reckoing failure doesn’t necessarily need to be a binary outcome.  

I mean, just because you’re not a raging success at something doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth trying, does it?  You can fail a little bit and succeed a little bit and maybe at the end of the day you learned a little bit about a new thing, a little bit about yourself and a little bit about the universe.

Me? I try a lot of things and I’m not necessarily a raging success at any of them.

So I use the word “failed” in a pretty casual way that isn’t neccessarily meant as a negative. It tried it. I learned something. I moved on. And maybe, yeah, I still dabble in that thing, or own the equipment, or even just think about it from time to time. It was a flop in terms of changing the way I live my day to day life, but now some time later, after the dust has cleared from the effort, it’s all worth reflecting on and definitely not a waste of time or effort for the attempt.

Oh, sure. There is also value in persistence. There is value in deep learning on a topic, value in practicing for years at one thing and becoming the absolute best at it, honing a craft for those apocryphal ten thousand hours so that you stop being a dabbler or an amature, and instead become something we vaguly define as an expert. And yeah, expertise is valuable. 

But then maybe some of us are destined to go broad, to not become experts in a singlular field, but rather experts in the universe, prolific tryers of anything once, twice, or until we get bored and try something else.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *