Is the Hobby Holding You Back From Being Great?

[SwivSnapshot]

Nope.

I was never going to be great in the common meaning of the word, nor did I have any particular desire to be.

On the other hand, gaming has helped me to develop my people management skills, my ability to speak in public and my ability to find creative solutions to problems.

 

[was]

No, IME occasional gaming helps prevent job burn out.

 

[MichaelSomething]

To quote a wise man, "Protection and power are overrated. I think you are very wise to choose happiness and love."

 

[ccs]

No, my hobby is not responsible for whatever my shortcomings might be.

 

[Psikerlord#]

Everyone can fit a bit of gaming in, and still be "great" at whatever they want to pursue. It's not an either or scenario. If you spend lots of time gaming, it's just like anything else, there will be some kind of opportunity cost. Personal judgment call as to when the tipping comes where it's not worth it.

 

[redrick]

I think about this from time to time. Not so much "greatness," but excelling in my profession. I work in a semi-creative profession, and most of my colleagues and mentors take their work home with them every night. I'm used to getting e-mails with ideas at all hours, and there's a big emphasis on what you can accomplish away from the keyboard.

RPGs work much the same way. I only play 4 or 5 hours a week (which, I imagine, is a lot for an adult with a profession), plus an hour or two more writing out notes or maps for my sessions when I DM, but, as a DM, I'm thinking about the game all the time, looking for ideas to bring to upcoming sessions. D&D occupies a lot of my creative headspace. I sometimes worry that having that creative distraction keeps me from focusing on my work and making big creative jumps at my job.

On the other hand, I've found that, when I really need to turn on the juice at work, I have no trouble prioritizing. It's a bit of a pattern — when things get slow on a project, or in between projects, I get creatively bored and start cooking up all sorts of campaign and adventure ideas, and push for my turn at the DM's chair (we rotate.) By the time I run my first session, I've started a new project, and all my creative energy gets dumped back into that, and my campaigns tend to fizzle once I run through the notes I managed to prep in between. And that's fine.

That's what's great about hobbies. They are much more rewarding than most jobs, and we only need to put as much into them as we can. If my group stops being rewarding, I can drop out. I can step away for a month because of work pressure, or ask to play every other week, or ask to switch to a different game world or style. In my profession, I have to put in the slog as well as the creative elements. I can't just walk away from a job every few months because it's not meeting my needs. Sometimes it is mind numbingly boring, and that's when my hobby sustains me, because I can be imagining adventures while I'm doing work that somebody should have gotten around to designing a robot to do. It's great creative practice, because I constantly have to generate ideas, trot them out in front of others, listen, revise, react on my feet to others' ideas, etc.

 

[pogre]

Everyone can fit a bit of gaming in, and still be "great" at whatever they want to pursue. It's not an either or scenario. If you spend lots of time gaming, it's just like anything else, there will be some kind of opportunity cost. Personal judgment call as to when the tipping comes where it's not worth it.

Yep, I agree - it's a matter of proportion. I'm sure even the great ones in my profession have some sort of hobby or at least watch a little T.V. or whatever. I'm focused on my job and we're fairly successful. However, I don't think about how to win all the time. I honestly think when Bill Belichick is at the beach in the off-season (or whatever) he is thinking about football at some level.

I'm old. I'm not going to change. It was just an interesting conversation about a topic I had thought about many times. I just wondered if others "in the hobby" had considered it related to their careers.

I appreciate the replies.

 

[Morrus]

One of my assistant coaches and I had a fascinating conversation this morning where he asked me about goals in life and what gave me satisfaction. I gave kind of the standard answer about having balance in all things, etc. He disagreed. He said every GREAT person he knew of was singularly focused on one of area of his life.

You're not paying this guy for advice, I hope.

 

[tglassy]

The Ancient Greeks would not have understood our concept of being one thing. He's an accountant, she's a cop, he's an actor, she's an engineer. They would have told you these people, who identify with their profession, and only one profession, were not full people, but only part.

Socrates was a playwright, a mathematician, an architect, an artist, a scholar, a teacher. They never stopped learning and doing. There is so much to life, and everything is connected. The more you do, the better you get at all of it. This thought that a jack of all trades is a master of none is false. Yes, there are those who excel over everyone else by focusing on one thing, but they have missed most of what life is by focusing on one thing.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

He said every GREAT person he knew of was singularly focused on one of area of his life. I said asking me how to be great and how to have a happy and satisfying life are two very different questions.

Quite so. Being GREAT tends to imply little more than being widely known to the world at large. You can be a world-renowned professor of xyz, one of the world's GREAT educators, and yet be unsatisfied for any number of reasons. You can be GREAT at politics, sports, business, etc. but that is not the same as having a satisfying life. Read a little bit from Mike Rowe. He's spoken with a whole lot of people doing jobs that many of us actively disdain and revile - but they are overwhelmingly people who are SATISFIED with their lives.

Greatness /= satisfaction.

My assistant knows I play games and enjoy the hobby and he asked - "Do you think the hobby held you back from being as great as you could have been?"

I think it probably has. There is not a day that I don't think about gaming on some level. If you take away the gaming, would I have the drive to use that time, focus, and energy into being better at my career. For me, the answer is yes.

But as a person who would be so much more focused on career with that time and energy, would you be as creative, as imaginative, have the same sense of humor, having the same perspectives?

What do you think? Is/has the Hobby held you back from being great in your career?

Nope. RPG's have contributed a great deal to who I am. Some of its influences may have been negative, but I feel that overall I am a BETTER person for having been a long-time gamer and I wouldn't trade it even if I could.