Everything That Wasn't a Detour

A few things I got wrong about discipline, focus, and what it actually takes to be sharp.

I was twelve years old, grinning at how quickly I’d finished writing my essay.

Math and science I took seriously. I had the highest grades in both for most of elementary and middle school. I also played three sports growing up, so it wasn’t that I sat inside all day. But academically I’d already decided where my effort was going. I wanted to be a scientist, and everything that wasn’t math or science felt like a detour.

So you can imagine how I treated English class. I did the bare minimum on purpose. I remember the specific satisfaction of finishing a reading assignment fast, not because I understood it, but because I’d spent as little of myself on it as possible. I wasn’t struggling. I was choosing not to try, and I was proud of that too.

Near the end of seventh grade, my English teacher pulled me aside. She also taught science and ran robotics at our small parochial school, so she knew me from a few different angles. She wasn’t cruel about it, just blunt, the way someone is when they actually know you and aren’t worried about being polite instead of honest. She said I was going to have to write no matter what I ended up doing, whether it was a research paper or just talking to another person, so I might as well try to like it.

It worked for about a semester. Then I fell back into old habits.

They didn’t really break until sophomore year, when a new English teacher recommended Camus’s The Stranger for independent reading. I went in expecting another book to get through. Instead it’s still one of my favorite books. That summer I kept reading on my own, nothing assigned, just whatever I picked up next. That was the first time reading felt like something I wanted instead of something I was getting through.

I’m a computer science student now, and I still see that seventh grader everywhere, not just in CS. It doesn’t matter what the one thing in front of someone happens to be. Once it becomes the only thing that counts, everything else gets filed under distraction. I used to think that was just what discipline looked like.

As I got older I realized I’d been kind of stupid about this. Alpine Valley, the startup accelerator I went through this past May, confirmed it. It was a small cohort, twenty-five people, and almost all of them were sharp in a way that wasn’t confined to one domain. The same people who could dive deep into their startup’s technical details also played sports seriously, read outside their field, had real opinions on things that had nothing to do with their pitch deck. It wasn’t one or two standout people. It was close to the norm in that room.

I don’t think this means everyone needs to be a world-class philosopher and a world-class programmer at once. That’s an unreasonable bar. But the pattern was hard to ignore: the way someone treats one part of their life tends to be the way they treat the rest of it. People who let themselves go soft, in their health, their reading, their curiosity about anything outside their main focus, rarely keep that softness contained to just one area.

There’s a tell I’ve started noticing. There’s the kind of person who locked themselves in a room and ground out one narrow skill until it looked like brilliance from outside. And there’s the kind who are actually sharp, and you can usually tell the difference by what they do with the rest of their attention. Can they improvise on the spot with another musician, can they explain to you why a 4-1-2-1-2 will fail against a 3-5-2, can they quote poetry without seeming pretentious?

I grew up believing real depth requires narrowing, that to get great at one thing you have to cut away everything else. I believed it enough to ditch English at twelve. I had it backwards. I haven’t coded less since I started taking music, books, and debate seriously again. If anything I code better, because half my best ideas for approaching a difficult problem come from somewhere that has nothing to do with computer science.

I think about that conversation with my English teacher more now than I did at fifteen.

If me from back then found out I was posting on Substack he’d think we’re cooked. Maybe he’d understand after reading this article, but most probably would only care about the startup accelerator part.