day no. 14,916: one trick pony brand dog food

My friend, Josh Miller, sent me this text the other day...

"One trick ponies make excellent dog food when their trick no longer works"

It is well worth your while to become good at something. And as I've recently discovered and begun telling my children,

"If you want to be great at something, you have to be willing to be bad at it first."

Those who are great at things were once willing to be bad at them, but were not willing to remain bad at them. They persevered and pushed through in order to become great by grit.

That said, it is always good to be diversifying one's ability and not hanging one's hat too firmly upon one area of greatness. Once a particular skill is mastered it may be the most difficult thing in the world to return to being bad at something else. It can become easy to stick with what you know rather than endure the difficulties of being bad at yet another thing. 

But one trick ponies bank a lot of their future dependency upon that trick being enough for all that life will require of them in the future. 

To put it into other words, a one trick pony is fragile. Everything is fine... until it isn't. A pony with a bag of tricks can be resilient and even anti-fragile in that they are prepared to face adversity, learn new tricks, and have the character to be bad at new things in order to be growing in greatness in many things.