(4-minute read)

There's a popular story going 'round that sounds something like this: excellence is achieved by doing one thing well. Choose something you are passionate about, commit to it, practice and study incessantly, and one day you'll master your craft. You'll achieve excellence. Then you'll be great. You might even get rich or famous.

You know this story, right?

It's been catapulted in recent years by Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000-Hour Rule, as found in his book Outliers, which states that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice are required for world-class performance in any field. Since the release of Gladwell's book, youth super leagues have multiplied, teenagers now see pop or sports superstardom as the inevitable result of rote repetition, and parents—if they weren't already competitive—now elbow and politic their way through crowds for the chance to buy multi-thousand-dollar violin lessons for their six-year-olds, lessons which resemble full-time jobs more than extracurricular interests.

But we've been obsessed with notions of excellence since long before Gladwell. Remember Aristotle and his aphorisms about excellence and repetition? Habituation, suggested Aristotle, leads to virtuous character. And look at us today. We laud experts for their unrivaled zeal and singular devotion as though they were saints. We bow at the feet of the Steve Jobses and Tiger Woodses and Kobe Bryants of the world. Some would even suck off Macklemore, while playing on repeat his masturbatory hymn about 10,000 hours spent rapping in the mirror, a hymn entitled, ingeniously, "10,000 Hours."

But Macklemore is rich and famous, so the story must be true: practice one task incessantly, and demigodhood awaits.

I think there's another way of living, a better way, that get's completely overlooked in America because it's not culturally glamorized. I call it the way of the Overzealous Dilettante.

The Overzealous Dilettante grabs life by the balls—or the pussy, for that matter—and sucks and fucks it until he runs out of juice or life runs dry. Let me explain.

Traditionally, dilettantes are disparaged in American culture. They are equated with loafers, laggards, and slackers. When slackers are spotlighted, as they have been in movies like Ferris Bueller's Day Off or Dazed and Confused, it's often unclear whether they are being celebrated or mocked. Few, it seems, take the lifestyles of The Dude or Bueller as guides for happy living. Most point and laugh at them, even iconize them, but then jump on their hamster wheels in the morning to chase down the American Dream. In truth, our cultural depictions of dabblers are caricatures that allow American adults to reminisce about the former selves they outgrew, or to mock the kind of person they wish they would've become. But American culture has never properly shown us the way of the Overzealous Dilettante, the obsessive dabbler.

The difference between your everyday dabbler, or slacker, and the Overzealous Dilettante is negligible on the surface. Both can't hold a job. Both are unlikely to cultivate longterm relationships. Both are hedonists, chasing novelty like trout chasing dazzling lures. But in constitution one is as dull as a pencil eraser, while the other is as smart as that first sip of IPA from a cold aluminum can.

The dabbler loses interest because he isn't interested in life to begin with. He isn't interested in discovering processes, within or without himself. In short, he isn't curious. The lures he chases encourage complacency. So he drifts from job to job or trade to trade. He remains, at best, and 'til his death, an amateur. This man can't even rightly be considered a jack-of-many-trades. You wouldn't call on him to help build your bicycle or drop a tranny or accompany you on an unplanned trip through Vietnam. About the only thing you can trust him to do well is drink your beer and smoke your weed. These dickwads should be avoided as much as the douchebags who subscribe to the myopic 10,000-Hour Rule.

An Overzealous Dilettante, on the other hand, has precisely the opposite problem. His problem isn't lack of vitality, it's lack of time. There isn't enough time in life to do just one thing excellently. He must do everything he possibly can, intensely, and therefore acquires whatever level of mastery he must in order to have increasingly intense experiences. And if and when the intensity wanes, he targets a new path and moves on, continually acquiring new skills and insights, developing new relationships and habits—but not so he can become "successful." His behavior, speaking plainly, is a function of living in and for itself.

So, how does one go from being a Gladwellian cunt or Lebowskian loafer to an Overzealous Dilettante? By jerking off in the mirror while reading more how-to-get-ahead-in-the-rat-race listicles, obviously.