Hypothetical question that's also a personality test: Would you rather be excellent and celebrated and sick of it, or mediocre and ignored and happy with that?

If there’s one things my kids excel at, it’s bizarre hypotheticals. What would you do if you woke up one day and you could taste through your fingers? Would you rather be a bird that can only fly for a few seconds, like a chicken, or a land animal that moves extremely slowly, like a tortoise? If you had to get transformed into some means of conveyance — a train, a boat, an airplane, etc. — what would you choose?

This is basically what dinnertime is like at my house. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when, the other night, my youngest came up with a good one: Would you rather be really, really good at something you did not particularly enjoy but were praised and rewarded for, or would you rather be extremely mediocre (or even just flat out bad) at something that brought you great joy and satisfaction, even though no one but you cared or even noticed?

It probably reveals some deep and largely unacknowledged defect of my character that I struggled with this one. My wife did not.

“Joy,” she said, as if it were obvious. “Always choose joy.”

She is a professor of modern dance, a position she achieved after deciding many years ago to devote her life to an art form she loved even though it doesn’t pay well and your average person doesn’t know or care anything about it. She knew all that when she made that choice, of course, so you can’t say she hasn’t lived her beliefs on this subject. She is also, as she often acknowledges, one of the lucky few who gets to do it for a living.

My kids concurred. Joy, even in mediocrity, they said. Even if it comes with zero reward beyond personal satisfaction. But they’re kids and have never paid a single electricity bill. Food just shows up in front of them. They get praised for remembering to put their dirty clothes in the hamper so someone else (me) can clean them.

I didn’t find it quite as easy to arrive at an answer. Maybe it’s because I wondered how much enjoyment I’d really get out of something I was objectively bad at. Or maybe it’s because I have such a deep need for external validation that I might be willing to sacrifice any chance of taking pleasure in the task itself if it meant I’d be celebrated by others. Kind of a disturbing realization to come to about myself, honestly.

But there’s got to be people out there living this reality, right? Somewhere there’s a scientist or a bass player or a brilliant lawyer who is sick of this shit but still really, really good at it. Maybe this person doesn’t know any other way to get money and respect, so they keep at it.

(Has anyone ever been less excited to be a champion?)

If you’ve ever heard Nikola Jokic talk about his immense and extremely lucrative talent for professional basketball, all while sounding bored and a little disappointed by it, you already know what I’m talking about. Georges St-Pierre, one of the greatest MMA fighters of all time, used to say he never had a fight he looked forward to. If a genie had popped out of a can of Monster Energy while he was sitting in the locker room and offered to fast-forward him to the part where the fight was over and he was victorious, he said he would have taken that offer every time. (I added the detail about the genie and the energy drink, but he really said that other stuff.)

I think there are some fields of endeavor where people start out enjoying it and end up being so good at it that they’re encouraged to keep doing it until they hate it. A friend of mine once said, in response to someone’s question about whether or not to let their son play football, that it would probably be fine as long as he wasn’t good enough to keep playing past high school. That’s when the damage and the risks would go way up, he argued. The sweet spot was being just good enough to play on the team and enjoy it but not so good that they wanted you to keep playing until you had brain damage.

But there are also plenty of people who take great pleasure in things they are bad or just entirely unremarkable at. In fact, there’s way more of those people. It’s called having a hobby. And one of the things that makes it a hobby is you’re not good enough to do it for a living.

But again, there’s a sweet spot. If you keep it in context for yourself — this is my hobby, or even my passion, and I do it in my free time but don’t kid myself that I’m great at it — it’s a positive thing. But we all know people who lose that perspective. They won’t shut up about their one-man play. They view every open mic as another chance to be discovered. They might be working as a barista for now, but just wait until the world sees how good this fucking screenplay is.

I once knew a woman who said that singing was her life and only later did I realize she meant that she did karaoke every week at a local bar. I’ve known lots of guys whose entire personality was jiu-jitsu but they could barely be considered competent on the mats. It’s that gap between passion and self-awareness that’ll get you.

Once a friend of mine was (very briefly) dating this woman who fancied herself a writer. She said she was writing a novel, and when I asked her how it was going she replied, with total sincerity, that it was great, just going really, really well and she was very excited for people to read it.

Immediately I thought: Bullshit, this person is not a real writer. I’ve never known any writers who would tell you, especially in the middle of a writing project, that it’s going well. It never feels like it’s going well. And if it did you’d be scared to say it out loud and jinx the whole thing.

But really, wouldn’t you be better off if you could get yourself to feel like that? I don’t think she ever did get that novel published, but neither did a bunch of other really good writers I know. So ultimately the difference between her and them is that she at least got to enjoy the process and feel good about it as she was doing it. That’s where, at some magic intersection, the lack of self-awareness about your own abilities or chances for success almost becomes a strength.

That’s the thing about this hypothetical choice between joy and excellence. With most endeavors, you only really have control over one of those options. You can’t choose to be excellent at something. You can work really hard and dedicate yourself to getting the most out of your talents, but that alone isn’t going to get your slow, short ass into the NBA. And with a lot of artistic pursuits, you could achieve a high level of technical mastery and still not get the recognition (much less any money or other rewards) simply because taste is subjective and sometimes no one gives a shit even if you’re really good at what you do.

But the joy part is more under our control. That’s the part that’s specific to you, so no one can take it away from you unless you let them.

Years ago, interviewing one of my favorite fiction writers, Jim Shepard, I asked him something along the lines of, what if I spend all this time honing my craft as a writer and it doesn’t get me anywhere?

His response was: “Is there something else you’d rather be doing?”

Then he just left it like that, because the other part was implied: Then fucking go do that then.