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Comment by beat | Hacker News Reader

My mother says a specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about nothing, and a generalist is someone who knows less and less about more and more until they know absolutely nothing about everything.

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Also summed up in the old saying: "A jack of all trades, a master of none." The world needs both in different places at different times.

While these sayings are fun, and sort of true, they are kind of not useful. You should be a jack of various trades, a master of some. Specialization is for insects :)

Something I've learned from the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition is that once you achieve expertise/mastery at a skill, it becomes much easier to learn other skills at the competent/proficient level. In other words, you learn how to learn, when what you're learning is hard and requires much effort.

Having achieved expertise/mastery at a couple of different things (software deployment, guitar playing, other things), I find all sorts of common patterns between these seemingly unrelated skills, patterns I can then reapply for other skills. For example, being an improvisational musician has made me keenly aware of the passage of time, and immutable deadlines - an awareness that helps me with every other skill that involves the passage of time.

There are many interesting ways that the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition could be applied to the ideas in the blog post. There should be a few areas where you are an expert, a handful of things you should know at a proficient level, many things you should know at a competent level. You should be expanding the number of things in which you are an advanced beginner.

I also like what you said about your knowledge of music was useful to your programming skills. Being well-rounded individuals can make us better specialists.

You should get bonus points for the Heinlein quote.

The full phrase is actually:

"Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_of_all_trades,_master_of_...

Puts a different spin on it.

People often forget the full saying is "Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one."

Gives it quite a different meaning.

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