I’ve got a lot of interests, and often get stressed feeling as though I’ll never get around to working on or learning everything I want to. There’s two thoughts that I find helpful for this.

One is the SMBC’s 11 lives comic. The idea is that if it takes 7 years to master something, that gives you about 11 opportunities to do so throughout your lifetime. Zach frames this as being 11 short lives, treating each new start as a rebirth. I like this construction, and takes some of the pressure off of having to do everything right this moment. Some things can wait for another lifetime.

The second is giving up the idea of mastery as a goal at all. I will never be a chess master of any variety. To attain those heights, I’d probably have to make chess my full-time commitment and start about twenty years ago. By contrast, merely aiming to be above the median in lots of things is far more manageable. Statistically speaking, you’re already above average at about half the things you do without even trying! So instead I study tactics with chess puzzles and wrap my head around a couple simple openings and probably beat random people a decent portion of the time. I’m not winning any tournaments any time soon, but that’s not the aim.

You can think of this either as a sort of Pareto principle (80% of the results come from 20% of the effort) or, in the context of the SMBC comic, giving yourself more lifetimes to work with. Not to mention skills are multiplicative, not additive – if you spend some time getting Pretty Good at drawing, you’ll probably find it easier to get Pretty Good at painting later on. And as you build on previous skills, you may also find that the median is much lower than you expect.

I won’t claim to be able to cover much more than half of Heinlein’s checklist, but I do think that people are wonderfully versatile creatures and the pursuit of mastery can get in the way of that sometimes and that it can cause unnecessary stress.