There are two ways to suc­ceed in the com­pli­cated, bur­den­some flow­less inter­rupt­ing world we’ve made. Two ways to Get Things Done; any­body telling you there’s only one is sell­ing some­thing. Two ways to sat­is­fice and maybe even to excel.

One way, which is the way Most Often Sold, is to spe­cial­ize: Look at all that stuff clam­or­ing for your atten­tion. Decide what’s Good, what’s Bor­ing, what’s Dan­ger­ous, what’s Too Big. Give the least impor­tant things up, and focus like a champ on what your world, your peers, your bosses, and your bank tell you is the cru­cial, vital, right now most impor­tant stuff. Write all those things down in a big (but care­fully lim­ited) To Do list, ignore and dis­pense with incon­se­quen­tial stuff that doesn’t give those stake­hold­ers their imme­di­ate pay­off. Cross off the thing that implies too much imme­di­ate risk. Pick the one most impor­tant to Every­body, and dammit start Get­ting Shit Done.

But not all that other shit. “Your” shit. By which pro­noun one means, in fact, “their”. Eng­lish is handy for this, since there is no dis­tinc­tion between sin­gu­lar and plural “you”: “your shit” get­ting done may well be oth­ers’ too. We just like to slide that in there, for convenience.

More the mer­rier, right?

Now, as I said, there is another way. At least I think there may be. A much harder way, and riskier, and less pre­dictable. A way that for suc­cess surely takes some grace and skill and plenty of luck and more patience than the world grants most of us. A way of con­stant, embod­ied attention.

“Ad hoc, ad loc and quid pro quo. So lit­tle time—so much to know!”

Just stop a sec­ond (write it on your lit­tle list) and imag­ine you’re allowed to be a gen­er­al­ist. As it hap­pens, I believe that we all are gen­er­al­ists as a default, but I’m odd so maybe you need to pur­pose­fully imag­ine it. Set it up like a thought exper­i­ment, like an Empa­thy Role­play­ing Train­ing Exer­cise, OK?

You suck as a spe­cial­ist; you’re not evolved to be one. Your meat wants you to pay atten­tion to what’s around you, what’s inside you, the top part and the bot­tom part and the inside part. Your head keeps drag­ging you back into mean­der­ing day­dreams. Your heart keeps mak­ing your head change, from day to day, sub­ject­ing your myth­i­cal “ratio­nal” mind to phys­i­o­log­i­cal buf­fets mod­ern life doesn’t even have non­patho­log­i­cal descrip­tions for. Flow­ing through your blood are cor­ti­sol and adren­a­line and you get a lit­tle jolt of rein­force­ment when­ever you see a new pat­tern, a nov­elty, a pleas­ing dis­trac­tion. Art. Ideas. Love. Facil­ity. Engage­ment. Tits and six-​​pack abs. Any of those things.

In the Real World (not the thought exper­i­ment), we call these “atten­tion deficit”. “Inef­fi­cien­cies”. “Lack of focus”. Distrac­tion. Setback. Obstruc­tion. Unfore­seen cir­cum­stances. Delay.

All these things you look at, in your role of the “imag­i­nary” gen­er­al­ist in my exper­i­ment; all these roses you stop to smell, these friends who inter­rupt you with demands, these places you go and things you see and peo­ple you meet. They are delays of what? Of you?

In what way am I delayed by pay­ing atten­tion to more, dif­fer­ent, inar­guably inter­est­ing stuff? Grat­i­fy­ing stuff?

They delay com­ple­tion of my many projects, right? I do so much, that noth­ing is ever really done. I step away from my work­bench to make a new tool; I find a book on tool­mak­ing and see another nearby; I see the book is from a series; I see the series is from the 1920s; I note that peo­ple in the 1920s could make things of metal, by them­selves, with their bare hands, in their home shops; I want a home shop; I mil­i­tate among my friends to make a col­lab­o­ra­tive shop where we can share costs of tools, insur­ance, mate­ri­als, main­te­nance. And so on.

Am I delayed? Don’t be stu­pid. I’m busy. The only per­son expe­ri­enc­ing “delay” was, if she existed, the cus­tomer want­ing the thing I was doing at the work­bench originally.

By this argu­ment, the only real “delays” are expe­ri­enced by the peo­ple who call them by that name. A delay is some­thing that comes with an oblig­a­tion to per­form. I have not been delayed in sit­ting down to write this rant, unless by “delay” we refer in a back­handed way to the invig­o­rat­ing flow, the speedy and sur­pris­ingly pur­po­sive typ­ing, the fact that I am edit­ing and re-​​editing fif­teen or twenty times before you see this. Am I “delayed” because I stepped away and spent almost two weeks act­ing on these ideas, before com­ing back to post it to my blog? Am I “delayed” because this is a dif­fer­ent draft, a tighter, more coher­ent whole than what I would have posted two weeks ago? Per­haps my laun­dry is delayed; my taxes, my sys­tem admin­is­tra­tor duties, my busi­ness ven­tures were “delayed” by this.

In writ­ing this (count­ing both the day I started it, and the day I fin­ished it) I have left undone one hour’s worth of the things expected of me. And in the com­ing days, I’ll prob­a­bly be dis­tract­edly think­ing back to what I’ve writ­ten, car­ry­ing it for­ward, and thus per­haps my “per­for­mance” will suffer.

I’ll Get Less Done.

It seems to me this morn­ing (and still, two weeks later), that you might take all those diverse, attrac­tive baubles of the world, the many facets that show you allur­ing pat­terns and incon­stantly draw your eye and your mind and your heart—you could take them all every god­damned one of them and still man­age to think about them all at the same time. No, not the “same time”: all the time.

Frame the world and model its diverse parts, and envi­sion them as just what they are, as arcs of the Big Cir­cle. “One mea­sures a cir­cle, begin­ning any­where.” And as Char­lie implied but I will say out­right: it’s all one big circle.

In every one of those sup­pos­edly flit­ting ephemeral things that catch your eye, you should real­ize the com­mon thread. I allow you, hereby and hence­forth, to real­ize it. Go thou, be empow­ered, get your act together, and do so: These dis­trac­tions have caught your atten­tion because they are by def­i­n­i­tion related to one another. They draw you away from the focused, accept­able path of spe­cial­iza­tion, the bur­den of dili­gence, if only by the sim­ple fact that you have seen them.

You are a link. That’s the point. You’re not watch­ing the world, you’re part of the world. In it. And bet­ter yet: you’re the part of the world that links these things together..

That’s the respon­si­ble path. It’s a bur­den. To be part of the world takes grace, and effort, and rigor.

One can­not see one pat­tern every­where. You are not a gen­er­al­ist but a crack­pot if you see every­thing as con­nected to your per­sonal model of the world. When you cast every­thing as a nail to be struck by your One Impor­tant Ham­mer, you’re just falling back on another fla­vor of spe­cial­iza­tion. The world is diverse—more diverse than any sin­gle descrip­tion or model—and the proper gen­er­al­ist can­not be par­si­mo­nious, can­not be effi­cient in try­ing to force the world to fit.

She can’t afford to. A gen­er­al­ist has no more time or atten­tion than any other per­son. She doesn’t see the whole of the world all as being the same, as being proof of something.

She slices the world in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion. Along a dif­fer­ent axis, a per­sonal axis.

Inso­far as you have seen these many and allur­ing “dis­trac­tions” around you, and inso­far as you want or won­der or intuit some­thing about them… then by that very argu­ment, they are linked. They are linked because you have seen them, attended to them. They are linked through you.

So here’s what I’d like to for­mal­ize, nail down, pass on: I see these many things, all the time, and I know they are linked because if noth­ing else I have seen them, and per­haps if I’m lucky they are linked for deeper rea­sons, because of the real pat­terns in the real world, that like any ani­mal I am evolved to see every­where. The shapes that trans­form data into knowl­edge: it’s what we do. We’re made to see pattern.

The notion of Dis­trac­tion, at its root, is just a symp­tom of the dom­i­nant cul­tural model. This is a model enmesh­ing our insti­tu­tions and our lifestyles, our dom­i­nant busi­ness cul­ture and our acad­e­mies. It blocks so many paths, it canal­izes our cul­ture. If you try to do any­thing but spe­cial­ize and focus, you try to mix your apples and your oranges, your work and your per­sonal life, your schol­ar­ship and your busi­ness, your body and your mind, then the steady hum of the world whis­pers to you: it is delay! You have no right to dis­rupt oth­ers’ diligence.

It is a tacit sin.

And yet there are those among us who man­age, despite the con­stant pres­sure of the win­ning side—the spe­cial­ists’ team—to see and live and work in this lon­gi­tu­di­nal way I’m try­ing to point out.

We cope. We learn not to offend, to delay, to bring our tacit sins to light. Or else we don’t, and we fail in real and prac­ti­cal ways that have to do with fore­clo­sures and divorce, an entry on the DSM… pun­ish­ments soci­ety and our peers and supe­ri­ors mete out to main­tain their own To Do lists’ progress.

I’m talk­ing about the Life of the Mind. The Life of the Mind is not pro­fes­sor­ship, not build­ing a long cur­ricu­lum vita, it’s not being a talk­ing head with a big wiz­ardy beard and a floppy hat on Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel. It’s the cul­ti­vated abil­ity to span bound­aries, cross bor­ders of dis­ci­plines, bring what you’ve learned over there to bear over here, where they haven’t seen the connection.

The Life of the Mind is merely act­ing on the belief that what we see around us fits together. That every­thing is, in some con­text, of use.

Aris­to­tle had it pretty close. “The ideal man bears the acci­dents of life with dig­nity and grace, mak­ing the best of circumstances.”

A friend of mine, a man who could never set­tle down and do one thing, he points out that there are two states of problem-​​solving: explo­ration, and exploita­tion. His “explo­ration” is ran­dom sam­pling, the long-​​reaching jumps, the salta­tions, the visions, the major rev­o­lu­tions: call it “fancy”. If you want a prac­ti­cal use, in machine learn­ing we think of this as some­thing like model-​​discovery, the con­sid­er­a­tion of totally dif­fer­ent mean­ings and pat­terns, qual­i­ta­tive alter­na­tives. Some other fel­low, he might call them “par­a­digm shifts”.

His “exploita­tion” is not a neg­a­tive, not the social evil the word con­notes; it’s tak­ing what you have right now and pol­ish­ing and refin­ing and improv­ing incre­men­tally; call it “dili­gence”. In machine learn­ing, we might think of this as para­me­ter tun­ing, as find­ing the right num­bers to opti­mize the fit to the model we’ve agreed upon.

Another unruly friend of mine, who I sadly haven’t heard from in a long while, he called these same notions “order” and “chaos”. Isn’t it inter­est­ing, when you think about it? Both “exploita­tion” and “chaos” can con­note bad­ness: errors, dis­rup­tion, total­i­tar­i­an­ism. And “order” and “explo­ration” they are good things: ben­e­fits, framers of our world, knowl­edge and progress.

And yet they’re oppo­sites. Turns out I never noticed that before, in almost twenty years of throw­ing the words around. I’ll have to jot that down.

Oh, right—I just did. Where was I? Ah, yes. The path of fancy, and that of diligence.

So per­haps some of us, we should be mov­ing towards new mod­els, not bet­ter fits. Towards con­nec­tions not yet explored. Not mere rev­o­lu­tions, but mem­o­ries of what has been for­got­ten, atten­tion to what is ignored, and the idea of what it is for.

That crap they call “inno­va­tion” these days. Morons. “We need more inno­v­a­tive com­pa­nies!” they cry. Just think about that. Just sit for a sec­ond and think about that, about what I’ve just told you that implies and demands. An “inno­v­a­tive com­pany” is prob­a­bly not going to look any­thing like a com­pany at all. Not if your “com­pany” means what every­body else’s does.

So note well: The gen­er­al­ist should not be headed for any place where he is “done”. When are you “done” pay­ing atten­tion? When are you “done” talk­ing, con­sid­er­ing? When are you “done” learn­ing or see­ing? Spe­cial­iza­tion is eas­ier, sim­pler, more com­fort­able not because the world demands it, but because it can be mea­sured, com­modi­tized, eval­u­ated and rewarded. Because it’s a work­life that is obvi­ous, and trans­par­ent, and self-​​explanatory.

Just what is it that you do?

So note well: The gen­er­al­ist is not headed for the place where she can take a break and spend some time with the fam­ily and get a pro­mo­tion and really start on the hob­bies or retire or finally have some fun. She is work­ing, always. Maybe the work is more spread out, more even. But there is no “work day”, no “hobby”. In the limit, there is noth­ing that is not also some­thing else.

I look around me, and in every case the best step ahead moves me closer to a place where even more such “work” awaits. More of the kind of work I want to do. I go to work every morn­ing, I dream work, I am work­ing now.

Just what is it that you do?

And I say: This.

Some­times I wait a lit­tle while for them to hear me, because I want to see the light that tells me what I’ve said means some­thing. “I. do. this.”

So rarely, though. So rarely. So lit­tle light, these days. So then I just make some­thing up. Some crap about my job, some ran­dom inter­est. But… but I do this.

It’s true when­ever I say it. No mat­ter where I go… this is what I’m prob­a­bly doing.

There is some­thing inter­est­ing in every­thing; if not in the act or the thing itself, then in what it implies, in teas­ing out the hid­den sys­tem that gave birth to it, in propos­ing the process that could fix it, in build­ing the tools that the one task of Draw­ing the Cir­cle demands. Go out and squat in your gravel dri­ve­way and pick up a chunk and see the fos­sils or the crys­tals in it. Go to the library and find the book that has remained on the shelf the longest, and read it, and explain it to some­body. Go to your neigh­bors, and see what they’re doing, and try to help them with their work. Learn to run a let­ter­press; learn to build a house; learn to sell old books; teach a machine to think; build infra­struc­ture for tsunami vic­tims; explain the ori­gin of life.

Because that’s your work. Not those spe­cific things, because they’re taken. That other thing you’re doing instead.

The spe­cial­ist avoids what dis­tracts, and for so many peo­ple the worst dis­trac­tion is the thing that con­notes mean­ing. When you spe­cial­ize, you must not seek more ques­tions; you seek answers.

And yet these days some of us are crip­pled, are con­sid­ered bro­ken, are in fact and prac­tice avoided by soci­ety and our employ­ers and our insti­tu­tions of learn­ing and gov­er­nance, sim­ply because we walk a path that leads to more choices, more insight, more con­no­ta­tion, more questions.

The best ques­tions are the ones that raise the most follow-​​on ques­tions. Not just in the Ivory Tower. In life.

You are not allowed to be a gen­er­al­ist, of course. For your own good. Every advi­sor will tell you how hard it will be to “keep more balls in the air”, to focus on so many tasks, to split your pre­cious atten­tion and time so many ways that you will in the end get noth­ing done. Noth­ing will ever be finished.

So smile at these advi­sors. Nod. But just ask them, next time they press you in your busi­ness, in your school, in your entre­pre­neur­ial train­ing ses­sion, in your soft­ware day-​​structuring To Do list pro­gram, just ask them about what it means to “finish”.

Just what is it that you do? And when will you be finished?

Called a flighty dreamer all too often, I think increas­ingly that I stand on the side of real­ism. I will be fin­ished when I’m dead.

And so will you. Any­body who tells you dif­fer­ent is sell­ing something.