Pitfalls and Benefits of Doing Everything

For the first two semesters of my college career, I hadn’t declared a major. I was paralyzed by everything I was interested in. I didn’t want to choose a single path because in my mind it meant that i couldn’t do anything else. Engineering? Philosophy? Business? Physics? Biology? Journalism? These were all things I could see myself doing. My solution? Wait and see. So I waited, but I didn’t stop doing stuff. It was a very ‘follow your heart’ period of my life. I ended up taking 12 credits of philosophy (all of which were ethics), joining AIESEC, starting my first company Agora Tutors, starting a science fiction novel (around the time of NaNoWriMo), starting a blog, declaring a major in physics, dropping the physics major and declaring a major in biochemistry, declaring another major in molecular biology, taking an internship at a startup called Rocket Lease, setting the goal of running the distance of the Earth’s circumference, working on a project called ‘nLab’ at our entrepreneurship center, attempting to start learning Python, and attempting to start learning how to trade options.

I’m glad I’ve done all these things, and I’m still doing a lot of them. I’m still pursuing a double major, I’m still running Agora Tutors, and I’m still writing my book. The variety of things that I have tried has definitely given me a unique perspective on how things work, and despite the distance between biology and business and ethics and science fiction novels (admittedly these aren’t that distant, I could be doing poli-sci and physics), I cross-reference every day. I definitely want to keep expanding the variety of the things that I do.

That being said, I realized a pattern. Whenever a class got hard, or I was doing a shitty job on something, I would tend to do something else. Subconsciously I thought that I could make up for not doing one thing excellently by doing many things poorly. Quantity over quality. So that when I would see that I had not done something completely, I could excuse myself because I was doing a lot of other things. I always gravitated towards what I was doing the best, and when I wasn’t doing anything well, I chose something else to do.

I’ve gotten better at avoiding this, but I also see a lot of other young and ambitious people doing the same thing that I did. I’m not saying it’s impossible to handle a lot of things at once, or that you shouldn’t jump at opportunities to do things that you’re interested in. I am saying, however, that whatever you do should be whole-assed, not half-assed, and you should enter any endeavor as such. Not as an escape, but as a full-hearted and meaningful pursuit.