Published September 23, 2026 02:16PM
Corey Buhay, a Colorado-based editor, writer, and runner, once dedicated so much of her life to competitive ice climbing that she traveled internationally with the United States team. Yet, looking back on a lifetime spent chasing athletic perfection, she has come to a liberating conclusion: the relentless pursuit of mastery is often a trap, and true fulfillment is far more frequently found in being a generalist.
For the first thirty years of her life, Buhay lived by a singular, consuming mantra: If she could just be exceptionally good at one thing, she would finally be happy. This mindset is hardly unique. American culture has long glorified specialists—celebrating world-class skiers, virtuoso violinists, and elite surgeons as the ultimate cultural heroes. Meanwhile, generalists are often unfairly dismissed as individuals who simply lacked the focus or discipline to master a specific craft.
As a teenager, Buhay was firmly convinced that mastery was the exclusive gateway to personal fulfillment. When she first encountered the famous philosophy of Patagonia founder, environmentalist, and climber Yvon Chouinard—who famously argued that attempting to get any more than 80 percent proficient in an activity is largely pointless—she outright scoffed at the idea. To a young person steeped in the cultural mythos of achievement, Chouinard sounded less like a wise sage and more like a quitter. Everyone "knows" that real winners never give up.
This ethos is quietly reinforced from childhood. Teachers, mentors, and cultural figures constantly urge young people to find their "passion," assuring them that if they commit entirely to that one path, everything else will effortlessly fall into place. But the fundamental flaw in labeling an activity, sport, job, or art form as a "passion" is the implicit expectation that one must bury oneself in it until achieving absolute perfection. That places an immense, crushing burden on what should ideally be a source of joy or personal exploration, whether it is a casual hobby or a professional career.
Nevertheless, Buhay consumed that messaging eagerly. During her adolescence, she obsessively fixated on profiles and interviews featuring Olympic athletes, champion rock climbers, and best-selling authors—the undisputed apex performers in their respective fields. While she occasionally assured herself that she did not need to be an exact carbon copy of those icons to find happiness, she remained convinced that she needed to get as agonizingly close as possible.
The core complication was a lack of natural predisposition toward any single discipline. When she attempted to build an identity as a runner, she found herself perpetually walled off from her goals, unable to break the one-minute mark in the 400-meter dash. Despite coming close with a time of 1:03 once, she never crossed that specific threshold. In the years following her departure from track and field, she frequently tormented herself with the thought that she simply should have tried harder, especially given that she was, in her mind, only three agonizing seconds away from her target.
Other athletic pursuits yielded similarly frustrating patterns. She cycled through cross-country running, rock climbing, and a brief stint with CrossFit. Eventually, she stumbled upon a considerably more niche and demanding discipline: competitive ice climbing. To her own surprise, she managed to attain a high level of proficiency, spending several years traveling abroad as a member of the U.S. team and even securing victories in official competitions.
Yet, the anticipated happiness failed to materialize. While there were certainly fleeting moments of triumph, achieving competence at that elite tier demanded total life disruption. During her peak competitive years, Buhay had to let other essential aspects of her life slide, including alternative hobbies, casual friendships, and romantic relationships. There simply was no alternative method for carving out the requisite time and energy for such a specialized pursuit. The sport consumed every waking moment, eventually swallowing her entire identity. Instead of improving, her overall quality of life deteriorated.
Retiring from the sport proved to be its own unique psychological hurdle. She discovered that the only thing worse than constantly wondering how far a particular athletic endeavor could take you is knowing the definitive answer—and accepting that you will never again reach or sustain that tier of performance. It required a considerable amount of time for her to fall back in love with climbing simply as an enjoyable activity, and an even longer period to grant herself permission to engage in other sports purely at a beginner’s level.
These days, Buhay occupies a role she once would have dismissed: the dabbler, the weekend warrior, the generalist. She climbs occasionally, runs when the mood strikes, attends swing-dance classes on Monday evenings, and takes her bicycle out for a spin once a week. In essence, she is consistently a little bit bad at everything she does. And yet, she reports being happier than at any previous point in her life.
Reflecting on this transformation, she recently reencountered the very Yvon Chouinard quote that had once drawn her youthful scorn. Decades removed from her hyper-specialized competitive days, the words resonated with profound truth. Chouinard’s philosophy—advocating for throwing oneself passionately into an activity until reaching roughly 80 percent proficiency, after which the obsession required to go further loses its appeal, signaling a time to pivot to something entirely different—now makes complete sense.
This personal shift aligns neatly with broader academic observations. Recent research indicates that generalists frequently report higher levels of life satisfaction compared to rigid specialists. Their non-linear paths often cultivate superior problem-solving capabilities, greater cognitive flexibility, and a more diverse knowledge base. Furthermore, generalists demonstrate a higher propensity for gravitating toward careers and hobbies that provide genuine, long-term fulfillment, adapting more smoothly when circumstances shift. The underlying mechanism is straightforward: the act of learning continuously enhances an individual’s general capacity to learn, creating a positive feedback loop where each new pursuit acts as a gateway to hundreds of others.
Yet, even for those who embrace this philosophy, the persistent voice in the back of the mind can be difficult to silence. It is the familiar whisper suggesting that things could have turned out differently—that athletic greatness was just around the corner if only one had refused to quit. It questions what might have happened to a hypothetical career in cycling, swimming, or running.
Buhay acknowledges these lingering thoughts, noting that she still occasionally catches herself wondering how far her climbing career could have progressed, or whether relentless training could have finally shaved those elusive three seconds off her 400-meter dash time.
Over time, however, she arrived at the sobering realization that she was never merely three seconds away from that track goal in the first place. Achieving genuine mastery is not simply a matter of exerting a slightly higher degree of effort; it demands staggering, almost unfathomable investments of time and sacrifice. Elite marathoners log hundreds or even thousands of miles annually just to shave fractions of a second off world records, while top-tier rock climbers spend grueling years in training facilities and months working on single climbing routes just to advance by a single letter grade.
It is naturally tempting to romanticize missed opportunities and near-misses. However, unachieved goals are rarely accidental outcomes; they are the direct result of conscious decisions made for valid reasons.
Looking back, Buhay realized that thousands of hours—not a trivial three seconds—separated her from that elusive 1-minute 400-meter time. Looking at the reality of her past desires, she admits she never truly wanted to sacrifice that magnitude of time back then, and she certainly has no desire to do so now. The prospect holds no appeal when those same hours can be spent drawing, dancing, enjoying ice cream with friends, or simply experiencing the vast array of activities life has to offer now that she is no longer anchored to a singular, narrow objective.
For anyone navigating life who falls short of professional athletic status—or even high-level amateur competence—there is no reason for despair. In fact, the reality of living outside the elite tier is something to celebrate. Leaving rigid, outdated definitions of success behind means embracing the freedom of the 80 percent. And for those who have lived on both sides of the divide, that middle ground turns out to be the best place to be.
