Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

I did say I’d update regularly, but anybody who knows me even remotely well would be unsurprised by a long, unannounced absence from something I said I would do. This is perhaps not a good thing (perhaps), but all flaws in their time.

The last post was in February, yes, but I don’t care enough about last semester to summarize. For four months it was happening, and now it’s happened, that'll do. This summer — the more important period — was eventful. Long summers only feel long when the monotony is interrupted by some trip away or a large event, and this time family coming over (sixteen other people is in fact quite a crowd) was this summer’s comma.

I worked on a car (not as much as I’d have liked), boxed (not as much as I’d have liked), read (not as much as I’d have liked), hiked (see above), hung out with friends (), and did not skydive.

I spoke with a bunch (10-15) of people — adults between the ages 30-60 — about career and life and choices. My motivating factors behind this are answering questions that I’ve been thinking about for some time now. Perhaps I should have taken steps to answer these questions sooner.

“Can a sufficiently good person get whatever they want?”

I mean “good” here as its definition of skilled or capable. A lot of career paths that make you a lot of money (a goal) require lots of experience or connections, in addition to intellectual ability. I want to know if a sufficiently capable person can achieve whichever goals they set without needing to restrict themselves to a given career path and throw their whole day at a given subject.

This is pretty closely related to another question that means a ridiculous amount to me — how valuable is studying random things? A significant portion of my reading over the last few months has been about ancient Egypt — or dinosaurs, or art, or philosophy, or other topics equally divorced from the things I’m “supposed” to be studying for the career path I will probably be going into — computer science, finance, or math. Of course, the specific domain knowledge from the “other” fields will probably not help much — but the modes of thinking, the repeated practice of forming mental models for novel concepts, of analyzing foreign ideas — surely these are valuable?

I have tried — clumsily and ineffectively, probably — to seriously ask these questions of people I would consider successful or possess qualities I would like to.

The answers are — very luckily — yes, to both. Within the limits of the study, of course. Each person qualifies certain parts of their answer differently, but the overwhelming opinions fall along the same lines — certain qualities exist, that, at their extremes, can achieve whatever goal the agent sets their mind to. As for the second question, there are some caveats. Domain knowledge is a requirement but not the limit: it seems interpersonal skills and the like tend to be the limiting factor more often than not. In addition, the accumulation of and practice creating mental models seems to be very valuable. This is expected, I guess, but it’s good to be validated.

These are important questions to me because the answers to them dictate whether my current priorities and conceptions of the paths to my goals are dramatically different from where they should be. It seems they are not, and so I will not have to fundamentally revise certain parts of myself. That is comforting and convenient.

This semester started a week ago. This time is that dangerous period that happens in the first few weeks of every semester where the rush of motivation hits and I promise myself to a million different goals and watch as they inevitably bleed away by the end of the year. The idea that lets me still be hopeful is that over the last few years, the attrition rate of these goals has dipped. I don’t believe I should be any more optimistic than that, in case I ruin future me’s day when he probably looks back on this post at the end of the year.

Art, books, taste, and appreciation are weird to me right now. I will (hopefully) elaborate on this later.

I look forward to reading these again when I’m old.