David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

The way I think about this sometimes is I want a good bargain on learning.

I can become in the top 5% of whatever I defined as good at something.

much, much easier.

Perhaps it's 20 times easier, 100 times easier to get into the top 5% than it is to get into the top 0.1%.

That's almost impossibly hard to get into that.

But if I'm content just being in the top 5%, I could be in the top 5% on like five things at once.

I can get really good at writing.

I can get decent at driving a race car.

I can become pretty good at programming.

I can run a company.

I can have a family.

I can...

do a lot of things at the same time that gives me sort of that variety that almost that was idealized.

Karl Marx has this idea, I'm going to fish in the morning and hammer in the evening and paint on the weekends, right?

That there's a sense for me, at least, where his diagnosis of alienation was true.

That just that tunnel vision, there's just this one thing, I'm just going to focus on that, gives me a sense of alienation I can't stomach.

When I'm really deep on programming, and sometimes I go deep for weeks,

Maybe even in a few cases, months, I have to come up for air and I have to go do something else.

Like, all right, that was programming for this year.

I've done my part.