Proficiency or Perfection: The Renaissance of Adequate

They say it takes 10,000 hours of “appropriately guided practice” to perfect a skill, from climbing to chess to violin to Halo. If you want to be good at something, you have to put in the time. And if you want to perform at the highest level of that something, you have to put in an inordinate amount of it. My mind immediately conjures up romantic images of a young Michael Jordan shooting hoops in his dirt driveway, a la Space Jam or Beethoven laboring over the ivories of his beloved piano. 

I can hear the words Parks and Recreation's Ron Swanson saying, “Never half-ass two things, whole ass one thing.” 

Which is a nice sentiment and maybe good advice every now and then, but it isn't reality.

The other evening, I listened to a slightly older, imminently wiser, much better climber friend of mine lament that his life lacked balance. His career as an architect is skyrocketing, and truth be told, he’s one of the seemingly few adults who likes what he does. But his growing career has left zero time for the other thing that he loves and gives him life: climbing. 

Life requires balance. It requires protecting our time and energy. It might require protecting the things we love from the other things we love or the things that make doing the things we love even possible. Life is primary. Climbing is secondary (blasphemy!). And, thank God, so is work and school.  

I don’t want to half-ass anything. I want to whole ass everything but there’s only so much of my moneymaker that can go around. It’s been on my mind a lot lately, even before the aforementioned dinner with friends.

I think I’ve found a pretty nice balance between being a mediocre graduate student and a mediocre climber.

I’ll never be the academic prodigy that I admittedly and selfishly daydream about being. I’m not the brightest of the bright and sure, I could try to be a little brighter. My professors probably wish I would, just like my college and high school professors before them did. But I have passions and talents that don’t involve sitting at a desk all the time.

I’ll never climb 5.13. I’m not a strong climber. I’m not a technically savvy climber. And however much I wanted to be, it was just getting in the way of me having fun. Moreover, I have passions and talents that don’t involve being on the sharp end of the rope.

It might be nice, for a time, to be a dirtbag-at-all-cost romantic. Drop everything and live in a van or in a foreign country. But I have passions and talents that don’t involve being completely unfettered to society. (Why social norms and constructs are altogether considered “bad” by my generation is a mystery to me. And deserves attention that space does not permit here.) I need balance. I need roots.

If my buddy quit his architecture job and stopped training for marathons to be a better climber, would he? Absolutely. But I think what he needs -- what we all need -- is balance. I'd rather be increasingly proficient at a few things than endlessly striving toward perfection in one or two.

I want to be able to write a decent exegetical paper with a compelling theological argument. I want to be a proficient climber who can push my physical and mental limits in the mountains. I want to bake a pie that will knock a girl’s socks off. I want to make people laugh. And I want to have a job that I enjoy doing most of the time. But being well-rounded doesn't mean being an expert.

I want to live a happy, healthy life and I’m doing it. Here's to being adequate. Most of the time.