Meaning of life

Recently, I came upon an interview with Kevin Kelly, a co-founder of Wired magazine, who wrote, among other books, “Cool Tools“, a review of the best or unique tools for nearly any kind of job. In the interview, he shared some interesting thoughts about the dilemma between choosing a niche for your activities to optimize performance, and being a generalist, i.e. exploring a wide range of activities. By the way, this appears to be true dilemma, as there is no correct choice.

In photography, as in other activities, e.g. academic research, specializing on an area of strength has many advantages. However, if your personal domain of activity is limited, narrow specialization potentially gets you stuck on a local maximum of performance. Achieving a global maximum requires one to go down on the performance curve. In other words, we need to become beginners in order to ultimately become better in something new.

Kelly talks about a concept of finding not just what you are good at, but what only you are good at. Searching for this global maximum of performance is very difficult as it necessarily involves ups and downs of performance. In fact, it can take an entire lifetime. Perhaps, this process of figuring out is the purpose of life.