Should you try everything?

I hear a lot of talk about people who want to try everything in this life, and I feel it’s a fairly common idea between young people such as myself. But I’m not sure that this is a good way to go through life.

The advocates of such a philosophy would point out the importance of expanding your personal experience, and while I don’t necessarily disagree, I still believe that expanding experience is a means to an end rather than an endpoint in life. You might need that experience to leverage other benefits in life, and that’s what’s it for. You don’t need experience for its own sake. It’s not like your experience can be sold for money! 🙂

And even then, this gain of experience has to be directed rather than dissipated all over the place. If you want your experience to have any future impact, it has to be pointed towards expansion in a meaningful way. I could acquire the experience of playing the latest videogame, but is this going to help me in the future? It could, but odds are it won’t.

Now, the drawback to such specificity is that you really don’t know what tremendous experience might be lurking in an unexplored corner of your life. Some of the greatest achievements in history were probably conceived in such a manner, but so were many failures. However, I still believe there has to be some room for spontaneity, but it has to limited, simply because your spare time is limited.

Ultimately, there has to be a primary focus on which your energy is spent, I would say at least 70%. Like the rays of sunlight that burn through when focused by a magnifying glass, such is your energy. There has to be a certain endeavor in which you break through, or otherwise your efforts might just be wasted. The logical question then is raised: How can I be sure that what I’m doing is what I eventually want? But to that I respond: How can you be sure that what you’re doing is what you don’t want without at least a small breakthrough? You’re doing it anyway, and maybe have built some skills, so why not leverage a breakthrough in order to be sure. Are you willing to throw away time you have spent training and working just because it might be your calling?

In the end, I guess I’m not a big advocate of the idea of trying everything anymore. I think my energy, being at its peak, has to be spent wisely. That is, mainly focused on one specific target at a time, with something left for spontaneous discovery.