How do you manage depth vs. breadth in your hobbies?

A bit of a cliché example, but it never gets old: take a leaf from Leonardo da Vinci's book, or rather his notes! — all of which are digitized here[1]; flip through them.

da Vinci was famous for getting merrily lost into rabbit holes and missing deadlines. He gets a commission for a painting, and slowly starts mixing paints for weeks. Then he has an epiphany about an interesting paint mix, and gets lost into mixing paints for weeks on end. He ends up not delivering on his commitment.

Another example: he spent a lot of time dissecting human corpses and horses and made many draft drawings. Then he declares in his notebook something like, "I'm going to write a treatise on human anatomy; it will be better than those created by surgeons because I can draw exploded views of arms and muscles from different angles." He never finishes it. But, he discovered[2] the functioning of the aortic valve in the heart!

In his notebooks[1], you'll also see his frustrated attempts at learning Latin, and many other fascinating examples.

Definitely read Walter Isaacson's bio of da Vinci; it's riveting.

[1] http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=arundel_ms_263_...

[2] https://www.rct.uk/collection/919082/the-aortic-valve

I don't deliberately engineer it this way, but I follow my current mania until it gets too challenging, then switch to something else. It may seem like giving up at first, but things will inevitably circle back to that original obsession, which is then less daunting thanks to all the peripheral knowledge picked up along the way. All this shit coils and compounds if you let it.

Don't draw up an obnoxious schedule that devotes n hours to x a week. Don't set a hard limit on the number of interests either. Just do something until it stops being fun.

Shallow breadth and focused moderate depth. T- or Π- or m-shaped.

I try out lots of things and even if they don't become permanent hobbies, I'm glad to have a very basic introduction to them. Skydiving, kite surfing, marathoning, engine rebuilding, Alaskan mountain hiking are all things I've done on the order of 1-5 times. I may or may not do any of those again. I will never be good at any of them, but they are part of the human experience I have engaged in and I'm thankful for that.

Other hobbies I'm good at but will never be anywhere near a pro. I enjoy linguistics but I haven't read an academic paper in over two years (the last time I did was actually for a footnote in a law review article going off on a tangent about Chief Justice Warren's express opinion that courts shouldn't "sit as a panel of grammarians" and that an appellate court did so anyway and got a fundamental part of linguistic analysis wrong). I enjoy programming but the only project I ever felt worthy of publishing on GitHub is an old static site generator I wrote in C before they were cool (~2002-2003). And I'm okay with that too. My skill level is enough to be useful in automating things about my legal practice or having a framework to make learning the basics of a new language easier. It doesn't need to be more than that.

When you learn a new discipline you will inevitably reach a learning plateau, where it’ll take a lot more work to get marginally better.

Personally I really like touching different things but once I get to the plateau, I get bored and switch to something else. Eventually I’ll go back to that particular discipline, realize I’ve lost quite a bit of skill, reach the plateau again, and switch again.

I really never felt the need of becoming very good at anything…

It strongly depends on your personality. There's absolutely nothing wrong in being a "surfer" skimming surfaces of everything, in a way, your hobby might be to explore things as much as things themselves, if you're not "sucked in", maybe that's just fine? Sure, you don't know anything about woodworking compared to a carpenter, but you probably know more than most, enough to ask a carpenter the right questions, or fix some things that many people would have to pay for having fixed.. You might know enough about metalworking to have an interesting conversation with a finesmith, even if he outskills you.

Maybe, once in a while, take a deliberate deep-dive into some element of one of your hobbies, and see if you're sucked in, if nothing else, to satisfy your neeed to feel less superficial, but understand that you're not doing it to test your skills, but to test your tastes, to see if it's "more" for you than a "superficial" hobby.

Time is obviously a limiting factor for most of us, for me at least, less than .1% of the things I find interesting are ever pursued because time.

Before I became a parent a few years ago I was similarly pulled in so many directions (and as jim-jim-jim says, they interrelate). I willingly let go of numerous specific hobbies in favor of some general ones (I like target practice, so now I throw rocks, or, at most complicated, bouncy balls into a parabolic dish). I don’t miss what I’ve left behind, and I accept that I’ll leave it all behind eventually.

I know the feeling of mastery from bicycling as transportation since I was ten; if you haven’t put in the time to where something feels so natural and joyous, I recommend it, at least to help you decide if you want to bring up another skill to that level. And, it’s okay to keep exploring; you’ll be a master at starting things and could be of significant help to other explorers.

If I experience any fear of missing out, it’s with books. “Learning” is one general category of hobby I kept, mostly through books. … Perhaps the best advice I’d give is to accept that your life is finite and to practice equanimity (perhaps you already do, in which case I’m a stone you’re already stepping). Good luck on your quest!

I just do what I enjoy, and it happens that I found something I enjoy so much (racing small sailing boats) that I was able to become an expert in it.

The “advantage” over something like woodworking or playing the piano is that you can’t just do it all the time. You need the wind to be right, you need to get yourself to the sea, it takes time rig up your boat and get out on the water, ideally you need to arrange other good people to train with and it’s self limiting because it’s very physical. All these factors mean that although I’ve thrown myself headfirst into it and it’s something I plan my major life choices around, there’s still space to go wide and do other hobbies and activities.

The other things I’ve reached expert level in are complementary to sailing. If it’s too windy to train then I go windsurfing (so no trip down to the sea is wasted), if it’s not windy enough then I’m cycling to keep my aerobic fitness up.

I guess the takeaway from my experience is that if you find things that are complementary but cannot generally overlap then you have the chance to get good at all of them.

> I sometimes wonder if it would be better to focus on one or two things and go really deeply.

Nah, that sounds great! A rich life. I reckon just do whatever you're into at any moment without such meta-thinking, let alone over-thinking, at all.

I've always been into a lot of different things, the main thing I regret is 20+ years making little or no notes of what I was learning or what I was doing, or just writing into disorganized notebooks impossible to go back to. I kept a diary for 20+ years, but that didn't cover most of the details of what I was into. Thankfully, at last in the last 5-10 years I've been keeping records of stuff, mostly in various illustrated LaTeX books. I can only be into 1 or 2 things at a time, so next time I return to something, it's there ready to pick up again. Or looking through stuff from a few years ago is a great way to get new ideas to try I didn't think of back then. Good luck!

Don't overthink it; That is the point of a "Hobby" !

Do whatever catches your fancy at a particular point in time; depth/breadth don't matter. Don't make it into a "chore".

The point is to enjoy the process and striving towards a goal of your own choosing.

I’ve always rotated. I try to go as deep as I can on one thing, then I visit the other things round robin.