Over the past many years, there has been a steady trend of me slowly letting go of various hobbies I used to find great enjoyment in: playing the piano, competitive mathematics, writing fantasy novels, and quite a lot more. At first, this seemed like a rather inconsequential pattern of me losing interests in things I only really explored in my childhood. In fact, it was fairly easy to justify this tunnel-mindedness: “writing isn’t particularly interesting anymore”, “reading is far too time-consuming”, “i’ll never be the best at badminton anyway”, and so on.
At some point in the past few years however, these concessions began to hit a point where they were encroaching into activities that I found genuine interest in— or rather, activities that I felt, quite literally, defined who I was as a person. Sensibly, why would I let go of hobbies that I thought I held so much love for?
In high school, I had joined our school badminton team, immediately surrounded by atleast a dozen players who could easily beat me 21-0. A couple months later, I made a close friend a year younger than myself who completely blew me out of the water by every metric of mathematical performance. The same year, I joined the debate team and our English honours class, surrounded by a handful of students who outclassed me in poetry, literary analysis, public speaking, and lots more. Suddenly, the streak ended: I couldn’t wing math contests and land on top anymore, my casual badminton cost us the district banner, and my years of reading novels and writing stories felt mostly pointless.
I had, at some point prior to this, seemingly succumbed to a belief in the existence of innate talent: accepting that I was simply born to do something else, and that in the areas my friends had an inborn talent in, it would take me twice as much effort to achieve what they could achieve. While I didn’t quit any of these activities I genuinely liked (after all, I did genuinely enjoy them), I conceded to this belief that I couldn’t compete with the very best— justifying my inaction with an excuse of lacking some sort of gift. After all, placing second in every math contest wasn’t a problem, just like choosing to manage for the badminton team was a worthy sacrifice so my friends could play!
At each step, almost as a defense mechanism, I would specialize further and further into ____. By junior year, I had left every club that my school had to offer, instead spending most of my time training CNNs for sign language recognition and flying around the continent for hackathons. By senior year, I was attending maybe a third of my classes, instead spending most of my time working on frontier humanoids in Palo Alto, building the world’s most popular chess bot at a research lab in Toronto, and organizing the world’s largest youth hackathon in Austin. It was a win-win in my eyes: acing school, learning from some of the most inspiring people, and working on problems I had never even dreamed of working on. In fact, while I do describe this parochialism fairly critically throughout this post, I do think that this has largely been the optimal approach for the past many years. Atleast I haven’t come to regret compromising on the math concepts yet.
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i think writing after so long is making me bring too many different topics into one post and i’ve lost the plot :kms:
I moved to Waterloo
gym & running & etc
Suddenly, I’m far from the best at competitive math, competitive programming, software engineering, et al. Vercel: youngest, far from the best engineer. K-Scale: youngest, no RL experience, everyone is smarter.Jack of all trades, but a master of none. Quite a painful concession to make.
Even complete beginners (or objectively less capable) can hyperoptimize and will do far better than me in subfields of CS (ls50)
can’t do research + eng + job (optimizations? how do you choose what to optimize for? how you ensure you find the right maxima )
On a side note, Yet, strangely enough, in the field of CS, I’ve seen dozens of people do work I’ve only ever dreamed of achieved. At eleven, when I started to code to make interesting Minecraft servers, I saw dozens of friends online running megacorporations. At twelve, when I had just started to freelance and make money off my work, I helped create buildergroop, an online community of young developers: teenagers who had raised millions,
If jack of all trades is the right thing? actionable
For one, learn how to do things while not being the best at it .
Do more things.