Saturday, January 13, 2007

Who Has Time To Practice?

I read an interesting blog post at work the other day, by an Amazon software developer (I think) who was waxing lyrical about the importance of practicing your craft, like you'd do if you were a premiere musician or athlete. I can't say as I disagree with where he's coming from, but as I was perusing his long and passionate diatribe, I kept thinking: "Who the Hell has the time?" Oh sure, if I were a through-and-through computer geek - like some I could name but won't - then maybe that'd be an option. But I'm geeked in too many different directions to ever want to concentrate all my free time in one! Here's a short list of some areas I'd love to focus more attention on, but just not at the cost of giving something else up:

1) Comic book history (I get a bit of this via being on the Chicago Wizard World Silver Age Trivia panel each year, but that's about it)
2) Fiction writing as a craft
3) Java programming
4) Getting really good at First Person Shooter video games
5) Software architecture
6) The art of criticism, as applied to movies, books, comics, etc.
7) Video game programming
8) Effective leadership
9) Self-expression through blogging :-)

I dabble in most of them, though not all, but I just can't imagine I'd ever get the time to go deep into any one within the limited amount of free time I have right now. Maybe during retirement, though.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Everything I've heard about retirement is that they days just fly by and you are busier than ever. Perhaps that is due to volunteering or pursuing a hobby (not several). So I wouldn't get my hopes up that retirement will provide time to delve deeper in all 10 areas. I think you'd be lucky to just handle #1 or perhaps the blogging one (though one wonders how you could blog MORE)!