On Closing Doors
Much of our fears stem from uncertainty. It's then intuitive to keep as many doors open just in case, and meeting freshmen who want to concurrently "build and apply to YC" and "keep quant as a backup" suggests this hedging impulse is more foundational.
Ironically, that intuition leads to doors being creaked rather than open because the more doors you keep open, the harder each one becomes to open. Every path worth taking is crowded with people who've fully committed to it. Discipline, what I view as the main resource needed to push past mediocrity, is finite and replenishes slowly. Yes, I could "80/20" each door, but that 80% is where real competition begins.
There is comfort in hedging with the branding of a "generalist," and with the recent democratization of knowledge, it's easier than ever to maintain the facade. You can spin up React apps, register a Delaware C corp, triple major in college – all without real, deep commitment to any. There's real social credit in claiming breadth, and in casual conversation, no one challenges your depth.
But when knowledge is cheap, identity becomes a scarce resource. When you're spreading yourself across vastly different pursuits, you dilute it. No one knows who you're trying to be, including you.
The main challenge then becomes choosing which door to isolate. It's scary to all-in on a single door that may or may not work out, especially when you "find so many things interesting." I think this is a failure to distill one's thoughts.
We pretend to be objects being acted upon rather than agents making choices, what Sartre calls "bad faith." We say "I don't know whether to do A or B," but listen closely and you'll hear "I've always found X about A compelling, but Y and Z make me do B instead." Once you go through the mental exercise of mapping out the honest reasons for each decision, you may find that some of these reasons tend to sound like excuses.
Of course, some people genuinely don't know what they want yet. Maybe they're earlier in exploration, or their preferences aren't formed. However, in the past, I found myself shying away from following the writing on the wall. The question was never whether I had enough information; it's whether I was ready to admit what that information is screaming at me. Picking the door wasn't the hardest part, it was admitting which one I'd wanted all along.
Once I stopped pretending I needed more time to "figure it out," excuses became clearer and the choice easier. This transformed my uncertainty from a question of identity to one of execution. None of this means identity is permanent. You can always pivot when a path stops fitting. But the cost of changing direction after you've committed is still far less than the cost of never fully committing at all. Though I'm uncertain where exactly I'll end up, I know who I'm trying to be, and that clarity makes the uncertainty a lot more bearable.