Mänu
IT Omar 😷 🔜 PaxUThis is someting I wish I'd realized a lot sooner in life.
I have been informed it's not actually Vonnegut... The sentiment is still what's important
Harmonia Amanda (@[email protected])
@[email protected] @[email protected] it's not, it's a personal story someone added on Tumblr under a post about Vonnegut, and people who don't understand how Tumblr works reposted it elsewhere without crediting it thinking it was about Vonnegut too. Here is the original post https://three--rings.tumblr.com/post/625948601747636224/when-i-was-15-i-spent-a-month-working-on-an This person has tried to clarify the truth several times but it has been reposted so many places since it's very hard to do.
Jasper 🍉@ITOmarHernandez lol, less than a year later it's a "mysterious quote" according to lifehacker
📌 https://lifehacker.com/why-its-good-to-be-bad-at-things-you-enjoy-according-t-1847421639 (don't follow the link, it's a waste of time)
Yeah lifehacker isn't a good source.. Ugh need search engines that exclude such things...
Sam@ITOmarHernandez I was about to say... sounds particularly non-Vonnegut. :P
Gareth@ITOmarHernandez seconded
Steven D. Brewer 🏳️⚧️Being a polymath is fun and will get you lots of admiration from people, but it sure doesn't pay very well.
Coralie Renée@stevendbrewer @ITOmarHernandez maybe... but it's one of your many other beautiful resource that will inform you of process and what is it you truly "do" which can then give hints on the work that can pay the bills. ;)
Aphrodite (recharging)Clueful people and clueful works surround us.
The moment one realizes the answer key has always been in plain sight is revelatory.
The real q is how one chooses to react to blistering insight. Some are in awe, some are enraged, and some laugh like hell.
xs4me2Great take!
SpliceFixer 
@ITOmarHernandez This is seriously how I live my life - how I have always lived my life.
When people look at something I do and say "Oh, I could never do that..." it astonishes me. I tell them that they definitely can do those things, but I think perhaps there's this inner pressure that they need to immediately do things well for that thing to be worthwhile. That pressure is destructive. If I'm good at things, it was either accidentally, or it was a product of a lot of experience doing that one specific thing because I liked it and didn't care how much I sucked.
Maggie Maybe@SpliceFixer @ITOmarHernandez yes it’s so sad I remember speaking to a guy who claimed he wouldn’t do anything if he thought he might fail at it. What a sad boring life that must be.
Karl-Heinz ZimmerTHX for sharing this very good advice. 💐
LegalQuilts@ITOmarHernandez this is why I say we don't all need to monetize our hobbies. Sometimes a hobby is just for fun.
@BegoniaArizona@legalquilts amen. My niece said “you can make money crocheting these…” and I tried to explain that I wasn’t interested in making “these” and that I have 3 jobs for making money and crochet is my pleasure, my release from the stress of making money. I do it simply for pleasure even though I give away the competed pieces. Didn’t really land.
tom4okstate@ITOmarHernandez that's some wisdom.
msgbi Markus Sagebiel
Jorkin MahJongus@ITOmarHernandez wow imma need a moment
Wendy Nather@ITOmarHernandez @the_etrain It’s called “learning.” It’s great! More people should try it.
Grey Goo@ITOmarHernandez That's why I just do things. To do them. Life is worth loosing :)
berz 🏀🎭🎶❤️@ITOmarHernandez @wendynather as a dad this resonates.
Demian@ITOmarHernandez while this advice is valuable at an individual level it’s perhaps more valuable when applied in educational settings. I was reminded of this when I came across this toot from @alfiekohn
shortly after reading this post: https://sciences.social/@alfiekohn/110876499212297721
BTW, Alfie has been writing on variations of this theme for decades. Very worthwhile to check out his work
Alfie Kohn (@[email protected])
An impressively rigorous metaanalysis of 32 studies (with 200+ effect-size comparisons) finds a range of both academic & nonacademic benefits of Montessori (vs. traditional) schooling: https://tinyurl.com/mrx5ara2. The interesting question is which features (likely present in other types of nontraditional/progressive schools) account for the beneficial impact.
Stoneface Vimes@ITOmarHernandez I don't think I ever particularly knew it but it's somehow what I did anyhow. And I've ended up having a pretty darned great life. Never be afraid to live your one life for fear that you might fail. Better to fail happily than succeed in grumpy resentful misery.
🍸Pooka🥕Boo🍸Inspiring post... thanks
etuckeriv@PlayAllTheThings lol, crazy how timely and relevant this is, but I just scrolled past it and thought about your question.
Eric LawtonIf more of us thought like this, the transphobics wouldn't have any reason to go on about trans women playing sports.
Abolish the podium! Have more fun!
Aaron@EricLawton @ITOmarHernandez You know, that's a great point! I've been going over it in my head, trying to reconcile fairness of one sort (letting people be themselves) with fairness of another sort (potential physical advantages in sports) and I couldn't come to a satisfactory conclusion. But I never stopped to think about what actually *matters*. If there's an unfair advantage in sports, it's really not of any consequence except to people who take it too seriously. But if people aren't allowed to live as themselves, that's world-shattering for them. I should've been more wary of bigots attempting to frame the question for me in a way that suits them.
spooky Ske-Lil-ton 🦇@hosford42 @EricLawton @ITOmarHernandez the interesting thing about this is, that they don't even really have an advantage: https://www.thepinknews.com/2026/02/04/trans-athletes-study/
And Usain Bolt also has some "biological/genetic advantage" as have many other winners in the Olympics (e.g. longer arms in swimmers), excluding all of them would be really silly. Especially since training is also a pretty huge part
So there isn't really a foundation to exclude trans women (or have restrictions that are this strict)
Joe Morris 🐶🏰🐉🍎@ITOmarHernandez @Alphastream There isn’t much I regret doing because I couldn’t do it well enough (nothing I can think off of the top of my head), but many things I wish I’d done at all. 👍🏻
MaybeMyMonkeys@ITOmarHernandez among other things it teaches you that there is more than one way of doing things and many of them have been done before. Helps with problem solving when you realize you don’t have to reinvent the wheel and can concentrate on the more interesting things.
Erich VI adore the sentiment but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this attribution anywhere other than on a Tumblr screenshot.
@ErichV that's fair. The sentiment is what really matters to me ultimately.
@ITOmarHernandez 100 percent!
Canela Blanca
JD@ITOmarHernandez By any metric, I suck at running. But I still get out there and do it because I like the experiences. 😂
bodhidaveA bit different perhaps but I'm reminded of the time an American Zen teacher I know was starting up a reading group. He suggested to the participants that they come to it "100%."
One member of the group, though, stated that he was actually feeling kind of half-hearted about it.
And the teacher said, "Then my suggestion to you is that you be 100% half-hearted."
🙂 🙏
Random Weirdo@ITOmarHernandez Thank you! That's exactly what I needed to hear.
Richard W. Woodley ELBOWS UP 🇨🇦🌹🚴♂️📷 🗺️@ITOmarHernandez
I think I could never really apply myself to learning French because I was pretty sure I cold never master the language as well as I do English.
I think I could never really apply myself to learning French because I was pretty sure I cold never master the language as well as I do English.
Lstn2urmama 🇨🇦@ITOmarHernandez ...EXACTLY and I have done over 50 different professions in my life and am 69 and there are a few others would like to do ...BUT it is the knowledge from those 50 that is very usable in this timeline ...WHO KNEW !! 😉🤔😉
@ITOmarHernandez Add another 3 years and have learned more ...
ArneBab@ITOmarHernandez Thank you for sharing this! It is wonderful!
K'Toche (aime le temps libre)@ITOmarHernandez let's tell the kids
Jim Gay@ITOmarHernandez looks like this was associated with Vonnegut because it was on this page https://three--rings.tumblr.com/post/625948601747636224/when-i-was-15-i-spent-a-month-working-on-an
But it’s not his quote.
@saturnflyer yep, someone else kindly informed me. 😊
Gordon J Holtslander@ITOmarHernandez I often think reading Kurt Vonnegut through high school kept me sane
12foxfire@ITOmarHernandez Amazing how the listening and words of someone can have such a profound influence on lives. I’ve had little snippets, but nothing this meaningful. It is something I think of often.
Tomáš Sobel@ITOmarHernandez This is what I'm trying to teach my kids.
I hope it resonate. We will see in few years. I love to do too many things, so at least they see an example.
HistoPol (#HP) 🏴 🇺🇸 🏴(1/n)
#KurtVonnegut is brilliant.
Everyone should be able to participate in his wisdom.
I did an OCR of your screenshot:
Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break, and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do...
(2/n)
...you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no, I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.
And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”
And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I...
(3/4)
...don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”
And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything...
(4/4)
... to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.”
Might be a good idea to copy them all into one #AltText
JL Johnson 
Guy Montag@ITOmarHernandez I like the sentiment but I must point out that this isn't from Vonnegut. It's from a Tumblr comment on a post about a Vonnegut anecdote.
https://three--rings.tumblr.com/post/625948601747636224/when-i-was-15-i-spent-a-month-working-on-an
Bacchus1234@ITOmarHernandez HELL YEAH VONNEGUT!
David Zaslavsky@ITOmarHernandez I have yet to realize this and I'm starting to think it would improve my life if I did 🤔
Richard Hendricks
cbud@hendric @ITOmarHernandez The whole science sector perpetuates the idea of exceptionalism, leading to exaggerated self promotion and claims of genius and novelty in an field where hard work leads to incremental gains. Doing science and perpetual learning is the fun of it.
David Conrad@ITOmarHernandez It reminds me of a quote from Bertrand Russell. "Time you enjoyed wasting wasn't time wasted," or words to that effect.
Världens bästa Kille™
Lou@ITOmarHernandez I love this! Great perspective ❤️ Thanks for sharing 🙌