(Reasonably personal)

I spend a lot of time trying to build skills, because I want to be awesome. But there is something off about that.

I think I should just go after things that I want, and solve the problems that come up on the way. The idea of building skills sort of implies that if I don't have some foundation or some skill, I'll be blocked, and won't be able to solve some thing in the way of my goals.

But that doesn't actually sound right. Like it seems like the main important thing for people who do incredible things is their ability to do problem solving on the things that come up, and not the skills that they had previously built up in a "skill bank".

Raw problem solving is the real thing and skills are cruft. (Or maybe not cruft per se, but more like a side effect. The compiled residue of previous problem solving. Or like a code base from previous project that you might repurpose.)

Part of the problem with this is that I don't know what I want for my own sake, though. I want to be awesome, which in my conception, means being able to do things.

I note that wanting "to be able to do things" is a leaky sort of motivation: because the victory condition is not clearly defined, it can't be crisply compelling, and so there's a lot of waste somehow.

The sort of motivation that works is simply wanting to do something, not wanting to be able to do something. Like specific discrete goals that one could accomplish, know that one accomplished, and then (in most cases) move on from.

But most of the things that I want by default are of the sort "wanting to be able to do", because if I had more capabilities, that would make me awesome.

But again, that's not actually conforming with my actual model of the world. The thing that makes someone awesome is general problem solving capability, more than specific capacities. Specific capacities are brittle. General problem solving is not.

I guess that I could pick arbitrary goals that seem cool. But I'm much more emotionally compelled by being able to do something instead of doing something.

But I also think that I am notably less awesome and on a trajectory to be less awesome over time, because my goals tend to be shaped in this way. (One of those binds whereby if you go after x directly, you don't get x, but if you go after y, you get x as a side effect.)

I'm not sure what to do about this.

Maybe meditate on, and dialogue with, my sense that skills are how awesomeness is measured, as opposed to raw, general problem solving.

Maybe I need to undergo some deep change that causes me to have different sorts of goals at a deep level. (I think this would be a pretty fundamental shift in how I engage with the world: from a virtue ethics orientation (focused on one's own attributes) to one of consequentialism (focused on the states of the world).)

There are some exceptions to this, goals that are more consequentialist (although if you scratch a bit, you'll find they're about living an ideal of myself, more than they are directly about the world), including wanting a romantic partner who makes me better (note that "who makes me better is" is virtue ethics-y), and some things related to my moral duty, like mitigating x-risk. These goals do give me grounding in sort of the way that I think I need, but they're not sufficient? I still spend a lot of time trying to get skills.

Anyone have thoughts?