It’s because we all want things, as we get smarter, we get more overwhelmed. This is my 5-year checkpoint into the process.
To start off, the first take-away from past 5 years is: you stop taking things so seriously after they have already been part of you.
Meaning: when you focus on developing a craft, a routine, a lifestyle or any type of change, it takes lots of brain power & big deal of thought to keep up doing that everyday, to be that person you want to be, to get from 0 to 1 in your development process. The slope is always the steepest at the start, but some time in, things come more naturally, you go to further places with less struggle, you don’t have to seriously think about it day and night.
An example can be a new sport or career path you want to start. No way it can work without investing extreme focus & attention budget, you’re going through a cold-start, from 0 to 1. No-way someone can get from 0 to 1 in more than one direction. For it to work you have to prioritize who you wanna be in one aspect of your life over the others.
So for someone to be multi-dimensional, what does it take?
The answer is rotated focus. A year has 4 quarters, so the way I think about it is: Instead of trying to be/do/have everything you want on everyday, you prioritize one area for a quarter. And then rotate your priorities through quarters & to your liking.
Few years doing this technique, it helped me big time. As long as you’re paying attention to your priorities —and to changes that are projected on your life due to these priorities— you’re becoming multi-dimensional, the kind of person who fits nicely in the overlap of more than one world, develops specified knowledge about lots of things, and whose character is not restricted by their work or hobbies.
Overlapped knowledge is what generally makes people interesting. Imagine you’re talking to the world’s top expert at anything, you’ll be bored shortly after you’ve been fascinated. Nothing to see here.
From a high-level overview, we find multi-dimensional people impressive, we often want to be like them. Because for a moment we naturally can’t seem to figure out how they have become who they are. We can think they’re naturally gifted, or maybe they have come through a lot, or whatever. In reality it often takes months & months of rotated focus.
Successful people broadly fall into one of two categories: They are either insanely good at one thing or they started off good at a few things and experienced **a breakthrough moment** in one of those things. The second one is more interesting, because this form of success comes from planting multiple seeds.
Imagine planting only one seed and watering it regularly with your best efforts only to find out sometime later the soil was contaminated, but now imagine you planted multiple seeds in different places and different climates. You stand a higher chance of at least one seed blossoming into something magical. True with startups, money & careers.
This is why I always try to do more than just software. Becoming an insanely good engineer who is top 1% is fairly tough but becoming a good engineer who can also do X, Y and Z at a pretty good level is reasonably attainable. Furthermore, doing a few extra things on top of your main “thing” puts you in a unique position within your niche. For example, you don’t get many engineers who know a thing or two about graphic design, copywriting or digital marketing (ref). So combining some of these interests may either allow me to find my breakthrough moment or allow me to create a niche for myself where I am the only person who can do my combination of “things” at a decent level, breaking the stereotype in the process.
This is not the first time I talk about this, previously discussed something similar with respect to careers:
blog.zeyads.com
blog.zeyads.com
Few weeks ago me & my friend were having a meeting with a legal consultant, not the kind of meetings we regularly do. First time to meet with him, but he knew beforehand that we were in software. First thing he said was “you don’t look like you are programmers, you look like fresh business grads”. I don’t know why but it was a relief. Because people always tend to think of other people as stereotypes & it sometimes can get scary if you don’t break the chain.
Hot take: We’re used to seeing this multi-dimensionality effect fade in people as they age. Many people are more full of themselves when they’re younger. And because being multi-dimensional makes people interesting to know & hang around, an extreme lack of it often makes people boring. As for why it fades with age, fact is it can be because of many things (marriage, mortgages, lack of sleep, lack of exercise, time restriction, etc) – but I’ve seen some of my wildest friends turn into the most boring adults over a span of 3-4 years, and it terrifies me. Only thing I know now is with the right mindset, I don’t believe anyone has to sacrifice any part of their lives if they play their cards right. Not easy, but also super attainable.
Multi-dimensional people they don’t take life seriously anymore; they get to a point where they’re enjoying it. Smartest people in tech have moved from “how to achieve peak financial success” to “how to live life in a happy way”. They’re not interested in titles or materials, just figuring out how to live a good life, be around good people & leave an impact.
A relevant snippet from an old podcast summarizes this concept: Link