Just because machines are specialized, don’t think you should be.
You’re not a machine. You are a complex human being, that thrives on many different things.
The world is chock full of stories of people who specialize, become successful, and then become victims of their own specialization.
Someone once said that poison is often a matter of how large the dose is. With many things, a little bit can be wonderful. But a large amount, or too much, can kill you, either slowly, or quickly.
To be interesting, and engaging, and to feel alive, and to engage with the world, and to connect with people, you’ve got to be both different as well as accessible. You’ve got to be complex enough people can’t quite figure you out, yet they feel comfortable with you as well. How can you do all that? Embrace variety.
A life made full with variety is the best way I know of to really win at life. Partly because it becomes not about winning.
If you watch the “making of” documentary on the Casablanca DVD, you’ll see how many different sorts of people contributed to it, especially to the writing of it. I think it’s quite possible this wide variety of talent played a huge role in making Casablanca one of the great movies.
Another ProxPattern that played a role is allowing some uncertainty. They talk about not knowing how the film would end, up until very near the end of the shooting. This allowing of tension throughout the making of it I think also contributed to the special quality of the film.
Doing a bunch of different things you don’t like is not variety.
Why? Because those different things share one common feature, which is that you don’t like them.
In a sense, they weren’t even a bunch of different things, since you felt the same way the whole time.
If you had felt a variety of different ways when doing those variety of different things, then you’d be getting somewhere!
If you want to get to sustainability, you’ve got to make it pleasurable for people.
A sufficient amount of variety in life is pleasurable, even highly pleasurable. Luckily, variety and sustainability go hand-in-hand, in part because they share one important thing in common, and that thing is diversity.
So if we encourage variety, reward ourselves with and for variety, and build systems which support and enhance variety, then we get to sustainability. And how did we get there? By making it pleasurable.
3 – On a scale of 1 to 5 (1 = poor variety, 5 = awesome variety), today feels like a 3 for me. Leave YOUR daily variety in the comments!
On the negative side, problems with work, and technical challenges, messed up about three hours for me today that could have been better used or more fun.
On the plus side, I’ve had time to spend on my ProxThink site, and this Variety People site, which has been fun. It stimulated different parts of my brain and provided new challenges. I also got Dropbox set up on my Mac and iPhone, which was cool.
How was YOUR daily variety?
