Two birds with one stone

I read a great quote from Robert Stavins, a Harvard professor of business and government, in the New Yorker a few weeks ago:

"Let's say I want to have a dinner party. It's important that I cook dinner, and I'd also like to take a shower before the guests arrive. You might think, 'Well, it would be really efficient for me to cook dinner in the shower.' But it turns out that if I try that, I'm not going to get very clean and it's not going to be a very good dinner."

I love this idea that the two birds you would get with that proverbial one stone might not be as fulfilling as one bird deliberately chosen.

Another great example of this tradeoff comes from my colleague Weston. When he entered college, his two passions were chemistry and painting, and so he initially planned on becoming, you guessed it, a paint engineer. The guy who figures out the chemistry of new paints. There must be someone out there who has that job, right? It seemed like a great idea, until he realized that this career would bypass both the creative expression of painting (which is what drew him to paint in the first place), and the most exciting cutting-edge areas of chemistry research, thereby leaving him unfulfilled on both counts. So he chose one of them, and is now a thriving biological chemist of world renown.

We choose these chimera activities for a variety of reasons. Maybe we are indecisive about a choice between two things that excite us, and so we try to do both. Maybe we are afraid of taking a leap and choosing something that is risky, and so we hold onto something that is more stable at the same time. Sometimes this strategy works well, but other times it holds us back from pursuing our passions whole-hog. Painting. Chemistry. Cooking that really great meal. Nothing feels quite so great as trying all-out for something that truly excites you.

In this day and age of multi-tasking, it’s worthwhile to take a step back and make sure that we are picking and pursuing our birds deliberately, and not just going for the riccoche shot.