Regarding Beemer’s post: I love what you say about the generalist/specialist division. Keep that meme alive, man. It’s going to come back to us; I just know it.

Also, to pithily summarize your other point: “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.” Google says that Don (or Dan) Stanford originated this quote. All I know is that I’ve used it for years, and I wish it were more widely circulated.

This is a variation on the theme I first was introduced to in Julia Cameron’s excellent book The Artist’s Way in which she advocates as part of her program writing three pages a morning. Any pages at all, but fill ‘em up. Truly excellent practice, and one I really ought to re-adopt.

Some related thoughts, roughly in the order in which your post triggered them:

…part of the reason I was leaving programming was that I didn’t have passion for it, and because of that, I was never going to be great at it.

I made this exact same observation about myself the better part of a decade ago, and it ultimately resulted in my life getting enormously better. Though my “current job” doesn’t pay as well as the sorts of jobs I’d have were I to have stayed on the track I was on ten years ago, that is in itself a misleading statement, since I would not have maneuvered into those jobs regardless; they are not sufficiently interesting to me for me to have given their pursuit my full attention and ability. And that says nothing of the relative lack of happiness I’d have enjoyed had I forced myself to follow that path as best I could.

By contrast, I spend a WHOLE lot of time and energy on my current pursuits, and that suits me fine. Honestly, I feel rather spoiled. I spend large swaths of time and energy doing things that look for all the world like “screwing around.” But it doesn’t take much of a shift in perspective (and a little bit of good ad copy) to recast those activities as extraordinarily productive and valuable to both community and pocketbook.

Your reference to deliberate practice reminds me of a recent Scientific American article which I have seen referenced many times recently, by content if not by name. The idea is that ten years of what you call deliberate practice is a (and in fact the) necessary precursor to mastery in most fields. This is an enormously powerful idea, I think, and I’ll let it go at that (and will print a copy of the article for your personal use, as I scanned it at the time).

The weekly personal scorecard is such obviously powerful mojo that I fear to use it. What evil will I discover!? Whose idea was it, and will you be my support group as I attempt to wield such potent magics for the first time?

Right on!

Anyway, I wonder if that might be part of the generalist/specialist difference: specialists are more comfortable failing at an aspect of things they already have some skill with (and thereby polishing out their weaknesses), while generalists are more comfortable failing at things they have no skill with (and thereby filling in their deficiencies).