Saw a tweet this week that's been stuck in my head:

I've written about this from the other side - (the speed of time), (why life feels half over by 23) and the idea is simple: novelty itself stretches time, repetition collapses it. Have more experiences, get more life.

But that word (experience) has a double meaning
and I think we miss it.

A person with "a lot of experience" is wise, weathered, knows things. A person who has had "a lot of experiences" has lived. Same same but different.

Wisdom-experience = doing the same thing many many times til you can see the patterns that the rest cant. The chess master. The surgeon. The hundred-deal angel investor. Its like you can see colors in the numbers. Depth.

Novelty-experience comes from doing as many different things as possible before the patterns set in. Gap year in Auckland. Move to New York City. Take a pottery class. Take a damn new way home. Say hi to a person on the bus. Breadth.

These two require opposite behaviors. The wise are deep in their loop. The alive keep breaking out of the loop. You can't really max both at once on the same axis.

BUT (and this is what the tweet made me see) you can stack them across domains.

Be a master of one thing and a tourist in everything else.
The deep loop pays you in wisdom.
The shallow ones pay you in time.

The prodigy is wise because they narrowed early.
The traveler is alive because they never did.
Most of us want both.

The trick = being honest about which one you’re spending your days on.

Peace,
Ramsey