On Skill — or Being a Virtuoso

It’s past midnight, and I’ve been surfing YouTube and Reddit for a couple of hours now. I’m thinking about a lot of stuff. But the main thing that I’m thinking about is how skill is king. People are appreciated for the skill that they have, people are proud of the skills that they have, people dedicate their lives to hone the skills that they have. I find the idea of being the best (in the world) at something very appealing. The journey of achieving that level of competence (is it just competence?) would be very challenging and uncertain, but the reward must be amazing. This touches on another thing: focus. Being the best at something requires a lot of focus on one (or very few) thing(s). I like the idea of being a virtuoso at something. Not necessarily being the best in the world, but competent enough to be confident and comfortable to show that skill. Better if that can happen without practice beforehand. For example, being able to just pick up a guitar and play a song by ear. This for sure requires a lot of practice and doesn’t come easily, but I believe it’s worth it. This is what I think being a virtuoso is about.

I don’t really understand why I think this is important to me. But I know that it is. And I’ve always been motivated by that. Maybe the next endeavor would be trying to figure out why’s that? I don’t think it’s competitiveness. I think it’s closer to honing my skills to the degree of being confident in them when I need them — being ready for whatever circumstances that would require them. It might be survival instinct: the best tribesman that can hunt is the one who’s more likely to survive. I kind of suspect that media just likes to glamour-ize these people (the best people in their fields) because it attracts attention, therefore ad money?

All I know is that I like to be confident in my skills, have them ready when I need them. I think it’s something competitive, but not the main reason; because I firmly believe that skill/talent/knowledge asserts itself. Skill wins at the end of the day.

How to measure skill? Sports are easy to measure by ranking. Other things that doesn’t have ranking, how would they be approached? Can they be quantified? What makes the best in the world the best in the world?

The problem with saying the best in the world is that somethings aren’t that easy to measure. Even in sports, where the best in the world is known by receiving a specific prize, one can debate even that doesn’t define the best in the world. It, more or less, tells us that some majority in some committee voted that that person in the most deserving of a prize. Which leads me to think that unless the criteria is clearly defined and specified, measurement of skill is subjective. Yet, measuring competence of a skill with confidence might be subjective as well. Some people are more naturally confident than others, and some people have lower expectations than others.

The idea of measuring skill is something that keeps me awake at night (like this one, which is another night than the one when I started writing this piece.) And after all of this thinking and discussions with friends, I’m starting to get convinced that it’s all relative. Some people who live in a family of chess masters are only confident of their skill when they can compete with their family in chess. Even though they can beat most people they play with outside their family.

What’s important about measuring skill is that you can measure your progress. I’m a believer that you should only compare yourself to your previous self, even if that’s a huge cliche.

I might’ve deviated from the main idea that I’ve started with. I like the idea of a virtuoso. I’d like to be a virtuoso in many things. What makes me afraid is the focus on being the best in the world. Let’s be honest, most skills require lifetime dedication to become the best in the world in. And while we only want the “hygiene threshold” level, or even a virtuoso-level, of skill, we get demoralized by the difficulty, if possible at all, of being the best in the world.

Being the best in the world makes good content: an exciting final F1 race of the season, an edge of your seat kind of football (yes, football, I'm not going to call it soccer) match, or a really close world championship chess game. Is it cool to be the best of the world? It might. Is it worth the tradeoff? Not really.

The first draft ended with “Skill wins at the end of the day,” I think what triggered all of this is the desire to win. I’m starting to realize that it might be a competitive thing. I think my question is: how much skill is required to win? And the whole blabbering above is just multiple attempts to answer that question.