I think I finally made my peace with the fact that I can’t seem to focus on just one thing. Whatever the main project is at any given time, it seems to be the side project that gets done first. For most of my life, I used to think of procrastination as a negative thing. I no longer see it that way. My propensity to procrastinate also seems to serve as an infallible compass. Away from the things that aren’t for me and towards the things that I enjoy doing. The things that I should be doing.
What matters in life is to move in the right direction. I think I’m starting to find mine.
I admire people who are great at the thing they do. I don’t admire them for that thing that they are doing but for having the clarity to make the choice against all the other things they could be doing. I don’t have that and I am getting more and more certain that I never will. It’s what keeps me up at night. It’s also what keeps me in a permanent state of distraction.
I have so many things on my mind that I am interested in that I couldn’t possibly create one profile to post them all under and keep it attractive for a reasonably homogenous audience. That Venn diagram has next to nothing in the middle. So the only logical solution then becomes to split my digital personality and have fun with this multi-persona setup. After all, why not?
I think this may be the first breakthrough on the subject in months. I am excited about it. And I am hopeful that I will be able to clean up the massive backlog of unresolved thoughts that I have collected. One at a time, everything in its right place.
There are probably very few people in the world who have obtained a PhD in Economics and also obtained a world record in a video game. In my case, that game was World of Warcraft and the record included a number of rank 1 logs that placed me as the second highest ranked mage in the world during 2019 Classic. I am thus in the unfortunate position to care about topics which have next to no overlap or synergy between them.
Yet recently an article caught my attention from both sides. The Economist reported on latest developments in the war in Ukraine, where drone pilots are getting resources allocated via a scoreboard. Points are getting scored by destroying enemy materiel and personnel and the most successful pilots can purchase new drones directly with their points. This is both genius and terrifying.
One of the first things I played were old school shooters like UT99 and Quake 3 Arena. The scoreboard was a powerful motivator back then when it tracked meaningless frags but a scoreboard that reflects someone’s successful commitment to defending their country seems like the mother of all motivators. The system also aligns everyone’s incentives and allocates scarce resources efficiently, which is why it will probably get rolled out elsewhere in the future. That’s the genus part of it. My suggestion would be to skip the terrifying side and to go all in here.
Currently we have drone pilots fighting other drone pilots while competing on scoreboards for more drones. How about we fast forward, skip the fighting in the real world and play StarCraft instead? The next step in the evolution of war is going to be autonomous robots fighting other autonomous robots and that’s pretty much the same thing. So why not do it in the virtual world?
Because South Korea would achieve world domination, obviously. Still, food for thought.
I’m writing this post at a time when I should be writing something else. Unfortunately I’m very bad at keeping my focus and the only way I’ve found to regain it is to get the things out of my mind that occupy it when they shouldn’t. This is one I’ve been sitting on for a very long time.
By now I have a very large collection of unpublished posts. They usually start with a great idea, get worked on for a bit to put them into good shape but eventually I can’t muster the courage to post something. I’m a selective perfectionist and publishing things is topping the list of things that terrify me. I’m publishing this one to work on that, so hopefully you’ll read on. But that’s not the main reason.
The main reason I haven’t published much is something else – my highly diverse interests. Seeing how I use feed-based news sources, what I worry about is people’s tendency to listen selectively to those voices who are highly knowledgeable and specialised. And my problem is that I care about topics which have very little overlap, so posting about passion A might stand out as completely irrelevant for someone who only cares about passion B. I’m not fully sure how the content selection algorithms work but I assume that posting off-topic is not going to make it to the top of other people’s feeds.
For readers it has become more effective to curate one’s own filter bubbles (plural, hopefully) than mixing everything into one feed. If I want to stay current on trade policy, I need to listen to certain voices. If I want to know how the meta in Hunt:Showdown is changing, I’ll need to listen to others. For creators it has become almost mandatory to pick a lane in order to build a public profile that cuts through the noise. Extroverted specialists are rewarded by this, introverted generalists punished. I’m more of the latter.
I have decided to worry a little bit less about what other people might think about my thoughts and ideas and a bit more about getting into the habit of sharing them. Maybe at some point I’ll pick a lane for LinkedIn but for now this will be the space where I’ll publish. Feel free to comment or get in touch. Or just stay a while and listen.
