The Dilettante and the Disintegration of Discipline

There is a particular kind of man who wakes up in the morning with a perfectly sensible plan.

Today, I will concentrate on one thing.

I will finish the report. Review the construction budget. Call the contractor. Check the farm. Perhaps spend an hour thinking about strategy, leadership and the future.

A reasonable day.

Then the phone rings.

By 10:00 a.m., I am discussing a bridge.

By 11:00, I am calculating the cost per square metre of a market.

By noon, I am wondering whether granite should be replaced with silica-free stone.

At 1:00 p.m., somebody needs a concrete mixer.

At 2:00, I am thinking about cows.

At 3:00, someone mentions IFMIS.

By 4:00, I am contemplating human behaviour, faith, relationships and the peculiar things people do to one another.

By evening, I have somehow arrived at St Francis of Assisi, the Serenity Prayer, DNA testing in Kenya and the psychological consequences of telling people to "just be yourself."

This is not multitasking.

This is the controlled disintegration of discipline.

I know this because I have watched the evidence accumulate.

I have a farm, but also construction projects. I think about business structures, financial controls, procurement, technology, leadership and strategy. I write about farming, faith, relationships, money, failure, success and human nature.

My mind moves from calculating the cost of a building to wondering why a chicken behaves strangely without so much as a gear change.

My mind doesn't really have departments.

It has open tabs.

Hundreds of them.

And occasionally one of them starts playing music, but I have no idea which one.

The interesting thing is that I am not quite the traditional dilettante.

A traditional dilettante samples things casually, enjoys the surface and moves on.

I seem to have developed a more dangerous version.

Something catches my attention and I investigate it seriously enough to become interested, learn enough to form an opinion and sometimes learn enough to start doing something about it.

Then, just as the thing begins demanding sustained attention, something else appears.

And I am off.

That is where discipline begins to suffer.

I can start the morning as a businessman and end the afternoon as an agricultural economist, civil engineer, theologian, sociologist, amateur psychologist and procurement officer.

The problem is not curiosity.

Curiosity is probably one of my better qualities.

The problem is that I keep giving curiosity executive authority.

Every new idea gets promoted to Director of Immediate Attention.

There is no recruitment process.

No probation.

No job description.

It simply walks into the office and says, "I have an idea."

And I say, "Let's look at it."

Before long, it has a budget.

The farm is probably the best physical representation of this condition.

There are cows, sheep, goats, chickens, geese and guinea fowl. There is horticulture, irrigation, greenhouses, water infrastructure and grazing.

It is a diversified operation.

Or, depending on my mood, a physical manifestation of my inability to leave well enough alone.

Everything needs attention.

Something needs water. Something needs feeding. Something needs repairing. Something needs buying. Something has stopped working. Something has started working surprisingly well and now needs investigation.

My intellectual life isn't much different.

There is an engineer somewhere in there, an entrepreneur, a farmer, a contractor, a manager, a writer, a philosopher and a man who occasionally just wants to sit somewhere quietly and ask why people behave the way they do.

They all want the microphone.

And, unfortunately, I keep giving it to them.

The funny thing is that I actually understand discipline.

I have managed projects, dealt with budgets, procurement, employees and cash-flow problems. I have made decisions that required unpleasant consequences. I know perfectly well that things don't get done simply because I have good intentions.

Yet my intellectual life occasionally behaves like a teenager who has discovered YouTube.

One minute:

"Let's establish a proper financial approval structure."

The next:

"Why do cows do that?"

Then:

"Rewrite this."

Then:

"Compare these two projects."

Then:

"Is this advice actually terrible?"

Then:

"What is the complete Serenity Prayer?"

Then:

"Can you make this sound less AI?"

The problem is not that any one of these questions is unreasonable.

The problem is that they are all reasonable at the same time.

That is the dilemma.

I am curious enough to want to understand everything and experienced enough to know that understanding requires attention.

Those two things do not always live peacefully together.

Perhaps that is also why ordinary experiences rarely remain ordinary for me.

A bridge becomes a lesson in economics.

A farm becomes a lesson in leadership.

A difficult contractor becomes a lesson in human behaviour.

A failed appliance becomes a story.

A conversation becomes a reflection.

An encounter with an animal somehow becomes philosophy.

Something happens, and my mind immediately asks:

"What does this mean?"

There is something useful in that habit.

It means life rarely passes unnoticed.

But there is a danger.

When everything becomes interesting, nothing is important enough to receive uninterrupted attention.

That is where the dilettante meets discipline.

The dilettante says:

"What if I explored this?"

Discipline says:

"Finish what you started."

The dilettante replies:

"Yes, but have you considered this other thing?"

And discipline quietly leaves the room.

Perhaps the answer is not to kill curiosity.

That would be a terrible trade.

The better answer may be to give curiosity a timetable.

Write the idea down.

Finish the work.

Come back to it later.

Not every interesting thought needs to become today's project.

Some ideas can survive until tomorrow.

Some can even be ignored.

That may be one of the harder disciplines for a curious person to learn.

I have spent enough years moving between different worlds to realise that the variety is part of the fun. Construction, farming, business, people and writing have all taught me things that I probably would never have learned by staying in one lane.

But there is a difference between having many interests and allowing every interest to become an obligation.

Perhaps that is the real lesson in all this.

The dilettante is not necessarily the person who knows a little about everything.

Sometimes he is the person who keeps starting interesting things without giving enough attention to the few things that matter most.

And that is where discipline has to intervene.

Not by making my life narrower.

By making my attention more deliberate.

So, if I had to describe myself in one sentence, I might put it this way:

I am a serious man with an incurably curious mind, running an increasingly diversified conglomerate of unfinished thoughts.

The company has plenty of ideas.

The board has no shortage of strategy.

The chairman has several new initiatives.

The only unresolved question is who is going to make me finish one thing before I start another.

I suspect the answer is discipline.

Unfortunately, it has been trying to reach me all day.

The line is currently busy.