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It occurred to me recently that I was doing too many things.

I was writing a math book which was itself part of a planned three volume series, I was working to get an analog computing company off the ground, I was offering tutoring services in math, I was studying for the LSAT, I was playing chess in a fairly public-facing way, I was in the midst of writing multiple other pieces which were experiencing varying degrees of incompleteness, and this is just the stuff that I previously publicly disclosed.

With my attention spread thin across myriad projects, I experienced chronic dissatisfaction with my inability to do everything at once. So, I figured, it might be wise to stop trying to do everything at once. I'm twenty-nine years old at the time of writing this post, and while that isn't young young, it's young enough that if I take a step back to reorganize and focus, I might just avoid spending the next twenty-nine years attempting to do too many things poorly and instead begin to spend them succeeding at doing few things well.

I looked at the things at which I managed to do a satisfactory job and singled out writing as the most promising endeavor.

There's this old HBR article, Managing Oneself (many of you may be familiar), wherein Peter Drucker points out that "it takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence." I reread the article recently and that is the sentence that stuck with me. So, in an attempt to manage myself, I'm experimenting with heeding his advice.

I really like to write. I could do it for hours and hours each day and not get tired. At the same time, though, I always feel as if my writing has much room for improvement. The prose is good, the verse has rhythm, but there's just a little something more in each piece that I fail to deliver, and I get closer to nailing it with every new thing I generate. And yes, the old site had its charm, but charm is no substitute for genuinely solid work, and I'm old enough to know the difference.

To new beginnings.