I have a theory and it’s probably wrong. Or boring.

But I’m already writing about it, so what the heck…

My theory is this: People who do specific things very well are either normal, stable people who work very hard and practice a great deal or they are rabid, mildly insane and extremely eccentric people who are also phenomenally gifted.

See the diagram below:

This is certainly a very limited diagram. There are, of course, more than four quadrants of people. It’s totally silly to limit the vast number of people out there to just four categories. There’s like five!

I fall into that small, unnamed category of those who are rabid, mildly insane, extremely eccentric people who are not phenomenally gifted, but don’t practice either. Thankfully, I have taken care of the rabies issue. For now.

But seriously, here’s the problem: I am a dabbling jackass of all trades. (All trades except blacksmithery, that is. Bloody anvils!) As soon as something I’m working in or on gets too difficult, I find a new hobby or skill to take up.

There are several things that have haunted me for many years. One is this creepy ghost named Mr. Charlesworth Richenbacher. But he and I have been getting along for some time, so that’s really not a problem. But the other thing that has haunted me for so long has been my inability to practice things once reaching an operating level of proficiency.

For example, after playing guitar long enough, I could play most of the basic chords and all of the uncomplicated barre chords quite easily. At that point, my development as a guitar player choked, wheezed, and sputtered to a stop. When I could hack together a web page designed entirely in notepad without it looking horrible, I stopped working on my html and css skills. Same goes for Photoshop, Premiere, and a huge number of software titles, as well as the Linux and Mac operating systems.

More important to me than any other skill is writing, but I plateaued there as well and stopped practicing.

once I reached the point in college where I could crank out in 24 straight hours a high quality full term paper with research, full citations and multiple revisions, I stopped working on my writing. After I finished college, I didn’t write anything.

Unfortunately, when I was in second grade, after reading Alexander Key’s Sprockets, I determined that I would practice writing every single day of my life. Shortly thereafter, I signed my name in blood on the back inside cover of Beverly Cleary’s Dear Mr. Henshaw. And the blood’s now about as crusty as my un-practiced writing has gotten.

Today, however, I have decided to make good on the committment I put myself to so many years ago. I am going to write something every day. To keep myself accountable, I am going to post something every day. I won’t necessarily post what I write, as a lot of it will probably suck ass. But I will do my best to post something just so I can keep track of my progress.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll be the next Steve Geluso!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 6th, 2005 at 11:01 pm and is filed under Books, Personal, Random Thoughts, Rants, mathcaddy.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.