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In Defense of Dabbling
There’s value in trying things without commitment
As I write this, there’s an almost-new guitar sitting in my parents’ basement, a pair of slightly scuffed tap shoes in my closet, one mostly deformed ring holder on my dresser, and a dwindling supply of handmade thank-you cards — well, somewhere in my apartment, I think.
Collectively, these items tell the story of a decade’s worth of short-lived forays into new hobbies. Over the past 10 years, I’ve taken five guitar lessons, six tap-dancing classes, eight pottery-wheel classes, a two-day letterpress workshop, and two beginner ballet classes. And this ragtag collection of souvenirs is all I have to show for it all. There are no photos of me onstage at some sweaty-palmed recital. I don’t have a side gig selling pinch pots.
I loved those classes. I don’t regret a dime spent or an hour filled. Each one scratched an itch I was having, taught me something, or filled time in a pleasant way. But I still can’t help but feel a little sheepish whenever I look at my tap shoes. It’s hard to shake the nagging suspicion that I’ve somehow failed.
The world doesn’t look too kindly on a dabbler. In fact, there’s another, even less positive word for it: dilettante. It’s a word that connotes a blithe carelessness, a flightiness, a lack of seriousness or depth.
“Our society is overall a very goal-oriented, competitive culture,” says clinical psychologist Ariane Smith Machín, founder of the Conscious Coaching Collective in Raleigh, North Carolina. “So when we engage in something, we evaluate it in terms of our success, which is usually assessed in what we have achieved.”
By that logic, doing for doing’s sake, with nothing to show for it, is a waste of time. Kids are encouraged — sometimes subtly, sometimes with a heavy hand — to get a leg up in college admissions by getting their 10,000 hours underway on a hobby or sport (based on the idea, first introduced in a 1973 psychology paper and later popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, that 10,000 hours of practice can be a pathway to expertise). But being a generalist has gotten a bit of a bad rap.
And our culture of self-improvement only perpetuates this notion, says Kristin Neff, an associate professor of…
