Ask HN: I want to be an expert in many things but my lifetime won't be enough
If you are this kind, how do you decide which things to work on?
The important question is not "what should I work on?" or "how should I decide and prioritise?", it is something more like "I have thought processes, they model imaginary futures and guide me away from predicted harm. Why do I have an imaginary future of not being enough of an expert and feel suffering in the present? Where did that thought come from and what is it doing for me, and do I want to keep it?".
You can go with the desire for expertise part, "why do I need to be an expert in many things?" - whose respect are you trying to earn? Whose criticism are you trying to avoid? Who are you trying to avoid being like? What emotional disaster is that trying to protect you from? Or the other side, "what is so bad if I am not an expert in many things on my deathbed?", what's imagined social or emotional harm is that warning me of?
Deeper mathematics is meaningful to me for its beauty and the way it feels like arriving at some fundamental truth, for whatever value that can exist. Similar for deeper physics, it's very appealing to me to try to understand the world on some fundamental level, as much as we're capable. And I find it very satisfying solving a good math problem just on the cusp of my limits.
Then higher up the chain is chemistry, electronics, robotics, software. I love seeing how we can put these things together for practical or just fun purposes, and I love when I put something together and get to see the end result working and doing something fun or useful. Doing the little lab experiments in my physics classes in college, it was really cool seeing the math on paper describe what was going on right in front of me, that I made predictions for. Something more practical to put my skills to use a while ago was the light setup I made with turn signals and some other safety features with an Arduino for my ebike. Admittedly I also enjoy when someone sees what I did and appreciates it but I also do it for myself. Then there's AI which brings up all kinds of philosophical questions.
And on another plane I'm getting into the things that go along with homesteading like plant science and animal husbandry. Home grown food tastes better and it's another thing I just think is cool/fun.
This all comes from some combination of appreciation, awe, fun, practicality, or just finding things cool - not seeking validation or running away from something. But I can still heavily sympathize with wishing I had a hundred lives to live, or got to live a thousand years in some kind of university, so I could fully appreciate all of these things. Right now I'm getting out of a long depressive slump and feeling like I've wasted too much time letting myself go intellectually, and wishing I'd dived even deeper on some of them in the past, but I'm feeling good about the future now.
Acquiring expertise is like climbing a mountain. There are revelations in the process, and it is like reaching a beautiful vista and the joy of seeing things expansively, from a height.
I wish I could have this experience in other domains, and feel the constraint is just the physical and temporal bounds of life.
Still, I recognize it as a fantasy to want these things. It’s just simply not possible.
I also recognize that there is something to the Eastern ideas of awareness and consciousness and that you perhaps you don’t need to labor toward material expertise to experience life with expansive revelation?
While you may not be an expert in all of the fields you can definitely understand the basic rules that govern all of these things and build upon that. Mathematics describes all of it
Whether it is rarefied academic pursuits, music and arts appreciation, friendships, love, delicious food, sex, or ... we have to decline a world of countless possibilities to engage what is in front of us. And even then, we need rest periods in order to fully appreciate those rare few branches we do take. You can't enjoy or pursue anything 24x7. The nature of our experience is inexorably tied to the exclusion of other non-experiences.
In other words, life is a constant stream of decisions and branching points. The underlying angst of "not enough lifetime" is rooted, I think, in grief for these other paths not taken, for the loss of imagined alternatives. This is supported by the delusional idea that we could defer and return to every branch (given enough time). It ignores the ephemeral and limited nature of most opportunities and potential experiences, the necessity of closing one door to open another, and that most doors are never open to us (individually) to begin with.
You wouldn't just need a hundred lives or a thousand years but some kind of combinatoric explosion of a Multiverse You, where you could explore every choice of collapsing decision point. But what does that even mean? I think it's another delusion about identity and the self to think that "you" can experience the different paths. You'd be many someones else. If you could somehow fuse them together into an experience, you've just added some kind of sci-fi "hive mind" to your experience. But wouldn't you wish you could have experienced those things as an individual...?
To get stuck with this frustration is a failure to mourn. A failure to accept a finite life and get on with it. That leaves the grief stuck in the back of the mind. This is where philosophers of mind might tell you about desires as the source of suffering, etc. Where practitioners might propose moderation or the so-called middle path. Where the CBT folks might say you are on the path so you might as well learn to enjoy it, and offer a grab bag of tricks to help achieve that.
People do stuff and then they die, so try to have fun, do stuff that you want to do and don't worry so much about what mysterious voodoo motivates what you do, who cares?
If you make 10 people's lives better throughout your life, and you did that because of some childhood trauma that motivates you to be a savior or to get approval, who gives a shit? You still helped them.
Without some kind of urge we could be happy doing nothing, coasting on what the previous generation did until our society collapse.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain
It’s amazing the cheap cop outs people settle for faced with failure at the most superficial level. The anxiety and fear of failure ties them up and eventually they give in having earned nothing from toiling and suffering as much or more than their successful peers. Ending jealous for the utmost irony.
If only you could sit down and focus and complete one thing.
The real key for me now is feeling that I am enough just as I am. I still strive in my career and in a few hobbies, that's still important, but I try hard not to identify too much with them. I fail quite often but it's liberating. I try to frame my passions as things with intrinsic rewards and not things that bolster my ego.
As a bit of context, I have been applying for work for about a year now as a software developer in the DACH (german-speaking EU), to be able to eke out a proper living and so far, every job inquiry, every human contact I have made boils down to "me not being good enough" in some respect. Even though I am sure to perform well, given standard compensation and a reasonable work environment.
Everything starting from my education, my life, to my work experience has come under scrutiny and has become more fragmented and harder to coagulate as a coherent story as a result of this constant requirement for me needing "higher expertise to qualify".
Over the course of my life, I have encountered hundreds of situations where as a result of my own lack of expertise in some domain, I was oblivious and even sometimes happy to accept completely unacceptable results, bad products/workmanship or horrible relationships. As a result of bad experiences thereafter, I found myself studying how to manage things on my own, as consistently endangering my very own life didn't appeal to me.
So I feel myself pressured into studying more JS frameworks, more foreign languages, more programming languages, more engineering, more medicine, more chemistry, more psychology, more design science, more product science, more construction science, more everything until I achieve a level of reliable expertise.
At the same time, I am painfully aware of the fact that on my deathbed I will heavily resent the fact I had to spend all this time on personal expertise when probably "we could have had nice things" instead. To be honest, I feel resentment over the fact right now.
That's really the more pressing issues that you need to work on.
We all have blind spots about how things or people work, and we're all in a condition where "good enough" is almost always "good enough."
If it helps, the slow process of remaining curious and caring about the people and work you encounter that will build expertise, and that's a thing that takes decades to show itself.
And while we can do many things quite expertly in life, we can only do a few of these at a time.
What you might understand is that, to take just one domain, people looking to hire programmers are looking for is someone who knows about a certain domain, so anything that you're doing outside of whatever narrow field you're discussing with a single person doesn't really matter as far as many people are concerned. T0 the person hiring a junior JS front-end developer, the chemistry skills isn't often relevant.
Further, there is very little learning that a person can do outside of a job. That is a problem, but the way I personally solved it was to lower my expectations for jobs until I got one, and then keep looking for new ones until I found a position I have been quite happy in.
However, all that is outside of the problem you are describing: simply being a person is enough to make you "fit for life".
You don't need to be consistently grinding on learning new things if that's not an end-in-itself for you.
Simply being good enough at one or two things is what almost all of us have to be okay with, and so what you might consider is which specific issues leading you to feeling this resentment.
Are your expectations unreasonable? Are the people you're dealing with assholes?
I suspect that answer to either or both of those questions my be yes; the fortunate thing is that either of those are easier and more useful to deal with than, say, becoming an expert physicist.
My instinct is to go learn more, make another project, stall it out and come back when I'm better prepared. I can't really see what one more project is going to do for me though.
What feedback are you getting? Is it ghosting that you're interpreting as not being good enough?
If you think about it -- expertise isn't what makes a lifetime worth living. It's a sense that what you're doing has meaning: A meaningful life is what gives you that sense of "enough"-ness.
Meaning can unfold in different ways, but part of it is about being "in the moment" -- While you're learning music, you have to find meaning in that journey without wishing you were findign time for astronomy (or being frustrated that you're not actually Mozart).
I recommend the book "Why Smart People Hurt" which deals specifically with the challenges of smart people and finding meaning.
"All of the really great people of the past and of the present always have some singular destiny. Somehow they know exactly what they love, they find it when they're young, and they spend their entire lives doing that one thing. Their destiny, their singular passion becomes their entire life, and they love every minute of it. It's their calling, it's what they were born to do, and it's beautiful."
...
"People tell me I can't do all the things I want to do, and they are of course wrong, because I can and I do and I will. But I still can't ever reach my greatest, deepest, most secret goal, the goal I left off that list: to have a singular passion. Maybe that's ok. Maybe my life will always be about running toward that unattainable goal, trying and loving everything I find along the way. And maybe at the end, when I have to give an account of my life, I'll say that I never was anything, but I was everything."
Source: https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/5/21/life-without-a-d...
But in terms of actually picking what to focus on, I'd suggest looking for under-explored intersections of domains that are interesting to you. This is for two reasons:
- If the particular intersection is not field with a large number of people doing real work in it, the "bar" for being an "expert" is lower. In a well-developed area, even after doing quite a lot of learning, one might not be an "expert".
- The intersection can give you a view on those adjacent fields which may reveal other interesting opportunities, and may make you at least fluent or productive in those areas.
We don't talk seriously about increasing human longevity, primarily because science has been frustrated by the effort and it's a bit taboo because the assumption people have is that longevity will be reserved for the rich.
I'll give a different perspective: trust your gut feelings! In Emotional Intelligence, the author Daniel Goleman[1] writes
> [Some of life's big decisions] cannot be made well through sheer rationality; they require gut feeling, and the emotional wisdom garnered through past experiences. Formal logic alone can never work as the basis for deciding whom to marry or trust or even what job to take; these are realms where reason without feeling is blind.
It seems like you are already aware that you don't have enough time to learn everything, there's just too much options to choose from! Perhaps a better approach is to rely on your experience, trust that you will make a good enough decision, and learn how to be comfortable with making choices that are not necessarily optimal, but close. There's a reason for the saying: perfect is the enemy of good!
I think OP will be happy with whatever they choose to do, as long as they choose it and being worried before making any choice prevents them from truly trying to do something.
Not the OP, but here's my answer. I want to be able to win arguments. If I debate the merits of an economic proposal with you, and you say, "Sure, and what are your qualifications, exactly? Do you have a PhD in economics?", I want to be able to say, "Yes, I do have a PhD in economics, actually", or "I have read over 490 books about economics, including graduate-level texts. What are YOUR qualifications?". I want to be able to stand my ground with credentialed experts without necessarily having the same degrees.
The easier route to this is to talk loudly and confidently until the other person gives up.
Learn instead to recognize expertise.
Arguing with most people is like mud-wrestling with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig enjoys it.
EDIT: to expand on this, the smartest person I ever knew (the late Justin Corwin. Maybe someone here also knew him) would sit quietly during arguments until someone asked his opinion. Even if you got something wrong he wouldn't correct you unless he knew it would help you. He didn't lord shallow facts over people like many others do and his knowledge went deeper than you could explore with mere discussion. After knowing someone like this It has forever changed how I evaluate people's intelligence. Some intelligent people are not at all concerned about winning arguments and it's extremely refreshing.
Another principle of mine: There are no oracles. There is no individual, past, present, or future, who cannot be surpassed. No one is a knowledge god. If I learned everything Justin knew, and that wouldn't be too difficult, I imagine, then I, too, could gain a level of knowledge that goes deeper than one could explore with mere discussion, according to you.
Yes, you could. Your point is?
Great athletes, great artists, sure.
You just need to master rhetoric. No need to be a master of a specific subject to be able to twist arguments in your favor.
I'm absolutely not an expert in any of those fields and I'm not going to be. But my knowledge is enough to get things running and to tinker with it until it works if necessary.
I like it this way because I just get bored pretty quickly working on a single thing. Doing different things prevent be from burning out and keeps IT fun. And I think that this kind of guy is very helpful for small companies which can't hire experts for every thing. You can temporarily hire contractors but in my experience that often leads to subpar solutions as they want to get money and run away, doing as little work as possible instead of building solid foundation and writing lots of docs.
So how do I decide which things to work on? Well, whatever I need and whatever makes me want to stay at work. Many things.
I think of myself as an expert at software development. I have broad knowledge I can apply towards lots of 'problems'. I have a past of Linux and network administration which has always helped with bridging the gap of talking to and building for our actual admins and nowadays interfacing with SREs and knowing enough about k8s, I know how to read and diagnose error messages from tools and libraries and stacks I have never seen or built stuff in etc. I can write software in many a language you throw at me though I have ones I use regularly and actually know stuff about. I won't jump on building you a highly optimized trading platform using only Java primitive types as an 'expert' in that might because I'd find that very tedious and boring. Reading about it is very fun though!
Becoming an expert at just one thing in software to me sounds like being a carpenter and all you do every single day is to build walls. Nothing else (i.e. be a framer) or doing dry wall. Sure I'd probably get super fast and efficient at it. But it's gonna be boring as hell. I'd rather learn how to do many if not most of the jobs needed to build a wall, finish a basement, build a shed and roof it etc.
I guess what I am trying to say is that I scratch my itch by just doing the bits of everything I find interesting to some degree. Some I go into more deeply because they are interesting to me for a longer period of time. Others get boring fast and it's fine not to become an 'expert' in. Breadth first search for interesting stuff. If I did depth first I'd only get like 3 things into my lifetime and never know what I might have missed somewhere else.
Ecclesiastes 9:10
Basically, do the best work you can at whatever it is you need to do. In the end none of it matters.
Confucius: "Wherever you go, go with all your heart"
Sinatra: "If you're going to do it, it's no good unless you do it all the way"
Snowboarder: "Go Big."
- Tao Te Ching, Chapter One
"Expertise" is not something that exists per se, so as a goal, it is unreachable. In fact, the more I have put this approach to use, the more I realize how many things exist that I will never become an expert on. It also makes me realize that whatever I have the most actual expertise on is but a tiny tiny grain in the vast sea of knowledge in that one specific field!
Annoying thing is that my limits have changed as I got older and had children. So I often had to reassess the time that I can put into my interests. And ok that is life we all get old.
What I personally do for this is I go by what I call chaotic learning. Spending chunks of my time in different things based whatever interest me at that moment. For example, I am currently only trying to gain expertise in software engineering. I am super interested in math, philosophy, history, science etc too. But currently, I want to focus specifically on software and then after a certain point (idk when that point will be, maybe after I've financial freedom, maybe not), I will explore other fields too. But in software itself, there are so many things to do and learn too. So what I do is, today I am working on a side project to do with the terminal. After a few days, once I publish a v0.1, I will work a bit on an open source project I'm interested in. Post that, I might do some DSA. Post that, maybe back to my side project adding another new feature. Then maybe read one of the many books I want to read. Then maybe try to learn and build my own language and so on. You learn/build different things from time to time, based on what you really want to pick. That works the best for me. Chaos.
What we need is to develop habits of constant learning.
Here is one essential thing you can do to start learning a lot:
Fill your home with dual-language books, and keep opening them. Put a stack on your toilet.
By dual-language books, I mean books with the original language on one side, and your native language on the other. You'll find that the entirely of the classical pantheon, as well as much great literature and philosophy from many cultures is available in this form.
Spreading math books around your house helps too, of course, along with those on the other topics you want to master.
Keep opening them. Life is long, each day you can learn a bit more.
"Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves."
The best way to actually command subjects is to work on them. Spend some time at companies doing the things you want - preferably in high paying jobs - and then start something on your own where you have to wear all the hats and submerge yourself in the technical details.
It's not as deep as academia, but it's certainly broad. This tactic might be what you're looking for.
And if you get exceedingly lucky, you might wind up with the capital and stumble upon the kind of unexplored areas ripe for growth that Elon Musk did. That's probably the ideal scenario - you get to work on incredibly interesting subject matters through hiring the best talent in the world. Use your team as a high level search and filter algorithm, and be present to learn and enjoy the process.
I'm nowhere near as successful but have employed people to do exactly that. It's not a bad alternative.
I am talking about how you fit in learning the real knowledge of our collective culture over a lifetime, no matter what else you do.
You can read books till the cows come home, but don't expect to become an expert from reading alone. I can't imagine anyone on their deathbed wishing they'd spent more time reading on the toilet Vs actually practicing a skill.
I'm a software engineer posting on Hacker news. I know how to learn a skill.
This is something else, that you can have, if you read lots of books and learn more languages.
Becoming smart is, in part, about being exposed to lots of others thoughts, and lots of facts, and discussing those things and thinking through them yourself.
One does not beget the other.
I am not calling out the previous reply.
Is it as simple as having information and experience?
I have read everything on being a carpenter but I have never practiced, so therefore I am “book smart” when it comes to carpentry?
I guess this doesn’t really cut it because when someone claims their “steet smart” as a way to combat feeling inferior to someone else they have credited as “book smart” what they’re really trying to say is that they have knowledge that’s more useful in different situations? Or more practical situations?
The more I think about this the more it seems like claiming to be “street smart” is just saying “hey, I’m smart too, just in a different way” when you’re feeling a bit less than someone.
What breaks down is thinking this dichotomy captures the state of play wrt knowing lots of things. One of course has to practice knowledge, if that knowledge involves practicable skills, if one wants mastery.
If one wants to know history, or philosophy, or... many of the actual large bodies of knowledge that exist... one needs to get comfortable very regularly opening books. That doesn't mean it's all that's required!
I only used "book smart" as it is an Americanism and this site has a large American and/or people who learnt to speak en-US. I don't think anyone else would use that term.
For that I value it.
Basically I am calling BS for what it is.
What's valuable to me and the people who have used it is to compare how much time you'll spend on type 1 hedonistic fun vs. type 2 accretive fun.
Free / easy. https://app.sundialcalendar.com/
An app usually displays something on a page, but most of the data is asked from me, app processes it, stores it, displays it.
It’s an app, because it’s interactive. App means application, program, etc. but it doesn’t necessarily needs to be downloaded.
A useful mental model is to already see what you are good at, and draw (mentally) curves of your competence (I wrote about it in https://newsletter.smarter.blog/p/curves-of-competence). And then use it to figure out where to amplify.
Also note that becoming an expert is a lot of hard work.
Much easier than inventing a duplicator is to imagine you have done this already, and the duplicates are all the other people in the world, busy being concert violinists and working on cold vaccines. What a relief to find that you no longer have to bother with such things.
I’ve read a bunch of pseudo-science and heard about so-called “experts” claiming it’s possible and coming, but the field seems to attract charlatans promising immortality…
Let curiosity guide you, explore as many domains as you're able and willing to and become competent with most of them. The more domains you weave into the web of knowledge, notwithstanding the lack of expertise, the higher the probability you'll find links across the ever expanding network. Maybe delve deep into the foundation, occasionally or frequently, for you could stumble into something new. Consider teaching or talking about your knowledge; open a blog, write a book, whatever. It'll help others as well as you, now and later.
In the end, whether through our descendants, works or knowledge, we're all child of that instinct to leave something after our death, of which your post is yet another manifestation.
A few people I talked to in life, have this love for learning everything to the point they feel "afraid to die" before mastering something. They aren't Einsteins - they know that. But having that insatiable curiosity to learn something through & through. It is sad to be empathetic but also a revelation how passionate some folks are. And although its a terrible plan by design, it personally keeps them going on & on. I think what they need to understand is "how much expertise" is good enough. Finding inner balance is as important as finding expertise.
Damn, that describes me pretty much. Though I just feel sad that I'll die because I can't learn everything that I'm curious about. I felt this much stronger in college. Now not so much. Just trying to survive now.
One way I think about it, is that someone will pick up the torch - someone who follows my work, blog, maybe my children. I did that for my father's dreams. If not, you are long dead already & it won't matter. That gives a sense of closure
"Keep the curiosity alive. Its a powerful, motivating force. Just don't get too anxious."
You're so right about that. I just realized I had much more zest for life when I was more curious. I should try to cultivate more curiosity.
"skilfulness takes time and life is short"
After having family, what benefits them may reasonably be the higher priority.
But there are some fields of knowledge that give you more leverage towards obtaining expertise than others. Being an expert in Lisp, for example, will not make you an expert in C++. But it will let you realize that becoming an expert in C++ is very likely to be a waste of time, because being an expert in C++ means knowing a lot of random and mostly arbitrary trivia that has accumulated over many decades of bad decision-making.
There are a lot of examples of subjects that give you similar kinds of leverage. There are probably a dozen core topics that allow you to cut vast swathes through most of human knowledge: basic physics (GR and QM), the theory of computation and complexity theory, game theory and the theory of evolution (and how these are related) is probably the 80/20 list. So if you really want to maximize your expertise I would start by focusing on a few of those topics.
But, as others have pointed out, you really should take a step back and ask yourself why you want to become an expert in many things. Do you want expertise for its own sake, or do you want the prestige that comes from having others perceive you as an expert? Because those are two very different goals.
Ultimately, finding one's focus is the hardest and most rewarding part of life.
Most of us won’t be polymaths per se but we now live in a world where information and knowledge are in abundance in whatever field of interest and for the most part it’s almost “free”.
With abundance and accessibility (regardless of your class to some extend) can create anxiety and depression or even paralysis since prioritizing shifts entirely on you - mentally as opposed to life’s circumstances forcing you to a particular path because that’s or was the only option. I believe this is a major source of anxiety and even depression in the internet age.
My point is, unlike many commenters, I see your point and even share what you’re feeling to some extend. Most people assume it’s just a matter of priorities, killing FOMO and perhaps being content with life you have now or whatever life has handed you, but it’s not that simple. It’s much deeper.
Perhaps you’re dealing with Chronophobia [0] of some sort that need to be addressed. For me it manifested itself as fear of not having enough time to read all the books that interests me - even if I start reading 24/7 now! My wishlist is insanely long and growing, yet I’m hoarding books and magazines I bought years ago because I simply don’t have time! With help of an expert, I was able to trace my fear to growing up in third-word county in a village setting; curious about everything but with zero access to books / library or entertainment for that matter. I read everything I got my hands to kill time and quench my curiosity and now I have access to all books in the word but no time!
[0] - https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22579-chronop...
Another tip is to vigilantly avoid time wasting traps like instagram, facebook, video games, pointless youtube videos, etc. This will give you a LOT more time to pursue other things.
But yeah, this is a tough burden for us to bear. I mean, it is literally the oldest problem in human existence: our short time on this earth. It reminds me of a song from ancient Greece (literally the oldest surviving complete musical composition)[1]:
While you live, shine
have no grief at all
life exists only for a short while
and Time demands his due.
For me personally they often have been and still are a much needed way to escape plus a conduit to a multitude of other interests and my professional career (not directly related).
OTOH and more often than I would like to admit these days its meaningless, consumerist time wasting at best and an addiction at worst.
Taking away from other things and relationships even.
Yet even with the same old games and principles and all the addictive aspects I’d still love it as a hobby (in low doses) but I’m probably also not the only one still fooling themselves that it’s more than that.
Maybe it’s time to finally move on again (feels very hard though).
For me personally, it works best if I cut video games out completely.
I don't know how old you are, but someday, you are going to be approaching seventy years old, and look back on the long arch of your life and realize how much effort you put into things that didn't really matter at all, and didn't put enough effort into the things that do, like art, love, and friendship.
I've spent the last forty years of my life working on embedded systems in telecom, on technologies that reigned in the marketplace for some brief period of time, then were relegated to the dustbin of history. My father-in-law worked at IBM, and within ten years of his retirement, everything he ever worked on was obsolete.
Other than fundamental math and physics, everything is ephemeral.
Love, art, family, and friends will endure. All else is dust within the span of your lifetime.
I know I most likely won't be the best at any of them in my lifetime, but really it's not a competition for me and I'm having fun.
Only piece of advice is avoid content mills like Tiktok and Instagram that are designed to get you addicted and keep you from doing the things you love – although on the other hand those things can spark inspiration!
That's what I was thinking.
For an interesting approach, pick things which are unusual in the way you can clearly see that the established experts are wrong.
Then you would be misguided if you tried to do it like they do anyway.
There are ways to use our time that brings happiness in things that last and are not transient. A scripture says: men are that that they might have joy. Another says that what we learn by our diligence in this life will remain with us in the world to come. So it's definitely not a waste, to learn, and serve others with our time.
Citation needed.
I have also learned some of these things for myself, not depending only on what others, or books, say. Again, details in the site and nothing for sale there, no JS currently either.
Now that I'm officially retired I'm STILL trying to achieve expertise in multiple areas, but it feels good to know that I was able to support my family and build a retirement fund b/c of my modest expertise.
I know this isn’t very scientific, but as someone who’s struggled with this same question I would suggest just diving into any one of the things that you’re interested in. From there let your instincts and intuition naturally decide what you continue doing and what you abandon.
I’ve learned that it’s hard to force continued work in any area that feels like a slog. Our personalities are tuned to prefer certain activities or fields of study over others.
Find what feels natural and go, go, go.
Also good ideas aren’t vague, “I want to be an expert in many things” is too vague for an attainable goal.
My general approach is to take tiny steps in the direction I want to go everyday, ie, use the power of habit. This has several advantages, but mostly it's just easier for me if studying is a habit. Right now, that means doing a LeetCode problem every day to stay sharp for job interviews, reading about databases, and starting a new project where I implement a database myself, probably in Rust, so I need to learn Rust as well.
I do generally agree that there isn't enough time to spend on what you want, and work takes up way too much time, but in my experience accepting your limitations and learning to live a balanced life with devotion to tech interests and hobbies has been essential to staying healthy. Put another way, I don't want a crazy job where I grind it out for 65+ hours a week and burn out in 11 months, burn out is very unhealthy for me. Instead, my philosophy is one of sustainable daily movement, setting myself up for working not 2 more years, but 20.
my heuristic: does this work serve others? do i have to struggle at wanting to do it or do i struggle to stop working?
There is one thing you are doing constantly and that is: Learning. You are becoming one of the best at learning a new topic quickly.
So is not really as in susans blog post that we are never going to have a single destiny... our destiny is to be the best at learning new topics in record time. This is certainly useful at a research team and new knowledge areas can really laverage someone like that. It's like the category theory expert who can found relations between mathematical objects.
My mindset towards this comes from an stoic maybe buddhist kind of perspective mainly influenced by Thich Nhan Nhat: So you want to be an expert in many things but there is no time for that? cool, embrace it, hug that feeling, accept it you don't need to suffer about it and maybe you already know this and you are looking for practical advice to get more done right?
So that is what I do, I embrace this fact, breath it out, and continue with the topic at hand.
Now getting back at the distractibility-factor... the real problem is when this starts making us not deliver important things here i'm with the person who commented about systems. Atomic Habits is a good book to make those systems and make it simpler for our biased existence to follow a predesigned path daily just as if you were your own parent and designed systems for the little you, the one that have to make decisions daily.
Honestly some psilocybin have helped me understanding this... and micro-doing it seems to add clarity and helps on the letting go.
> If you are this kind, how do you decide which things to work on?
First step:
- You need to be an expert in prioritisation!
But I’ve found that to be tangential to what I’m actually interested in, so I’m still procrastinating.
I have other big books lying around my home: OSTEP, Algo Design Manual by Skienna, SICP, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Computer Systems A programmer perspective. They are all wonderful, that's why I bought them in print, but I'll never gonna finish them.
On top of that I'm doing a course on Docker. Learning more about Go etc.
So to answer your question. I no longer decide on what things to learn based on them being finisheable. I pick whatever I want to do today. Life is too short to do things you don't enjoy.
I'll never gonna finish my projects, but I have something to do everyday. I'm grateful for that.
I personally want to write a book, record an album, publish as first author in a tier 1 research conference and patent it, create a useful product with real commercial appeal, perform a standup special and be a great educator. As long as I don't care about citations, billboards or best seller lists it is all achievable.
I got the paper/patent out and am on my way to building a useful product of my own. I am getting better at the drums and jamming, have performed short skit comedy on stage and make sure to write long form stuff on useless internet forums. My educational pursuits are lagging, but I do try to mentor half a dozen people at any given point in time.
I didn't start with most until I was an adult too. As of now, it feels achievable. But my ability to achieve it is a purely internal pursuit, which helps. My natural ADHDness also helps. Ask me again in 30 years, maybe it'll be a good time to write about how I tried to do 20 things and succeeded/failed.
The key is to put yourself within easy access of these activities and be content with little wins. I wrote skit comedy when i was with fellow drama kids. I play drums now that i have a garage. I taught when my prof needed summer volunteers. I stubnornly seeked a role at the intersection of research and industry to find easy opportunities for novel applied research. The fun is in the journey. A healthy dose of self-delusion saying you don't care about the outcome also helps. I could go into a long tangent on the powers of self-delusion....but I'll leave that for another day.
Counterpoint: on a whim over Christmas I bought a flute. I don't play a musical instrument, I've no particular musical talents, but I've been working at it consistently if not deeply, half an hour a day, every day, since. I will never, ever be an expert at the flute. I will be better at it though; there are pieces I can play in August which I couldn't play in July. It adds to my life. If the goal were to become an _expert_ flautist then a) I would be delusional but b) it would no longer be a nice little interlude in the day. Were I to magically mature into a concert-level flautist, _would I enjoy giving concerts?_ Pretty sure the answer is no. Expertise is neither a realistic nor desirable goal.
Pick something else that remains. Impact.
Take a look at https://80000hours.org/ for some inspiration.
You have 80,000 hours in your career.
This makes it your best opportunity to have a positive impact on the world.
If you’re fortunate enough to be able to use your career for good, but aren’t sure how, our in-depth guide can help you:
Get new ideas for high-impact careers
Compare your options in terms of impact
Make a plan you feel confident in
It’s based on 10 years of research alongside academics at Oxford. We’re a nonprofit, so everything we provide is free.I have a great many interests, and I shift to focusing between them pretty regularly (and have for many years).
I enjoy all of them, but I likely won’t make any meaningful impact or win an award or have people ask my opinion in any of them. I only do them because I enjoy them.
If you’re truely honest, your lifetime isn’t enough to truly know anything - one subject or many subjects. You’ll pass away, and all your work will be forgotten in time eventually - no matter what. Life is impermanent.
So, my random internet advice: if you find one subject you really like, go deep. If you have a lot of interests, go wide. If you want a fancy job and people to fawn over how intelligent you are, be born rich.
It's a beautiful fact that your lifetime won't be enough for everything you want to do. It means what you choose actually has meaning and love behind it. It's sacred in a way infinity isn't.
And after that have hobbies that have as little to do with your job as possible.
You can be a top 10% in any given field with this. 20 hrs is worth the effort on skills you want to learn.
My personal advice - Learn only if you put that skill into use immediatly for your good or for the greater good of the society around you. Growth for the sake of growth is the mindset of a virus
What happened was interesting, but perhaps not applicable to you. The best advice I can give you is to find ways to benefit others. That's the open secret of life: one's own happiness flows from bringing happiness to others (self and other are ultimately illusions, All are One.)
Have you made a list of how you’d like to spend your time each week? Over years and decades, the time devoted to learning adds up!
Truly the journey is the destination in the human experience.
(Put off learning all you need to know about investing, health, and science. You can spend the entire day without getting any work done. Once you're independently wealthy you can spend your time as you wish.)
I'm attempting to put a dent into increasing our timelines (longevity) with my current project, Guava. The other way to get more time is to experience more in the same time, and for this we need improved brains and interfaces. I'll be ambitious and put my effort into these things because it will allow me to do more if successful.
But when some work comes my way, the large bookshelf comes in handy, because the books‘ authors knew more than I do.
Sometimes I just buy a book to see if some technology would fit my use case or not. I think it’s faster and cheaper than to dig into online documentation.
Looking at sports, it becomes obvious how much can be achieved with the right training. Unfortunately, right now, only the most promising talent in a field receives the best training. If we can automate that, it would be much easier to become an expert in many fields.
So, if you don't want to decide, you could also improve the infrastructure for becoming an expert.
Could you elaborate? I wasn't aware of this.
There are other factors, like a bigger global population and drugs. But that's secondary for sports where participants show off complex movements.
So the answer is: one at a time
If you can't decide, say, if all subjects are the same level of interest to you, pick one at random and spend 5 years on it. See where that gets you. If you are satisfied or bored, pick the next subject.
So, I don't think it's really an either get good at A or get good at B. It feels more like either get good at A and B, or neither.
This is my thesis, anyhow, for how polymaths emerge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics
Of course, even with a long enough life span you run into issues of brain capacity, but that is another discussion.
The good news is that it will likely be completely possible to effectively be an expert in all of those things. The bad news is that everyone else will be an expert also.
It will probably be kind of like what has happened now with Google and arguments over trivia. Just 10 or 100 times more integrated and in-depth.
I can assure you you're not alone, our brains are just wired a certain way. There's silver lining in all things, if you try to dig a bit.
Honestly I would drop the ego that fuels this mindset and make an inventory of the topics you've actually pursued in life so far. That can be a good indication of the things you truly find valuable, and it can lead to uncomfortable realizations.
I have 262,980 hours in actively practicing procrastination in my lifetime (30 solid years of procrastinating)
This is my life goal and I am doing very well in my progress at the moment.
You filter through your interests WAY quicker with a first pass and then you can return to topics you felt were interesting and recursively apply this strategy, until a prioritisation seems obvious to you.
Because being an expert in less practical subjects that are slightly dated can still be useful and interesting but may tend a little more towards vanity.
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"Thank you for this life! Still, I miss the alternatives. The sketches, all of them, want to become real."
"Without really knowing it, we divine. Our life has a sister ship, following quite a different route".
I'd also ask yourself "Why do I want to be an expert specifcially?" Is this really just a manifestation of narcissism? Are you really after admiration and respect? Work on yourself. That's the best advice I can give you.
Don't waste your time on things which aren't persistent or foundational. Example: learn physics before fashion.
people will find more personal engagement and happiness learning about what ever sparks their interest be it physics or fashion
only vlc work great at 2x speeds but its podcast handling capacity is not that great.
other players just let go at 1.18x ..
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/287818.Refuse_to_Choose_
“The wise man is one who, knows, what he does not know.” ― Lao Tzu
This is not to say "give up". But it is saying that you need to "give up" the idea and you will find peace.
Never been very good at planning, tho.
the benefit of not commited to one is you could be anything, problem is you are nothing.
The thought of never being able to make what's in my heart sent me to a dark place a few years ago and coincided with a profound burnout and breakdown in my physical health just before the pandemic.
As I've healed, I've come to believe in reincarnation. Not some woo woo metaphysical thing that can never be proven (it can't), but more like, having chapters or past lives within lives, usually transitioned through major life events and trauma. As in, my daily lived experience and worldview no longer align with the ones I had growing up, going off to school, entering my career, losing friends and family along the way, etc. This is maybe my 7th chapter?
Not only that, but we experience being ourselves in different lives when we dream. It's not a stretch for me to imagine waking up tomorrow in someone else's life, with no memory of my own. Which brings me peace, as it takes some of the pressure off of performing in my own life if my lived experience is just as sacred with the same dignity as everyone else's.
Where this matters is how I think about success and failure. Imagine if every risk we take is a coin flip that determines the next chapter of our lives in our next reality. Heads: we succeed and build upon that success. Tails: we fail and find ourselves deeper in the hole we've dug for ourselves.
Most of my heroes are successful people like Steve Wozniak and John Carmack. They enjoyed early success and found backing by benefactors who helped them stay on course and make the contributions in their hearts.
But I also feel a kinship with failures like Vincent van Gogh and Oscar Wilde. They worked in relative obscurity, never feeling like they accomplished what they wanted to do, all the way until the day they died.
My own life feels like a series of say 10 coin flips that all came up tails. In some ways I'm in the most wretched reality, the 1 of 1024 possible that most acutely exacerbates my suffering.
But that's not quite right, because my life is an equal balance of good and bad, in which serendipity gave me the most amazing experiences and opportunities. Almost like the universe was listening and went out of its way to lay the path for me to travel. I just didn't notice, because I was so wrapped up in external measures of success that I forgot that the important part is being alive and conscious to experience it all.
Now I have a pragmatic view of success and failure. I'm happy when people make it. But that's their experience, their life, their reality. What it really comes down to is, what to do with the time that is given to us, quoting Gandalf.
I think of reality now like a video game where we popped in a quarter to get an extra life. We do our best, we make our mark, then we find ourselves doing it all over again. I try to help people who have that fire in their belly to make the world a better place. But I'm concerned about people who haven't woken up to these sorts of ideas, who chase extreme wealth and power, in the end hurting an aspect of themselves in another life.
At the end of the day, my mantra is whatever it takes. I do whatever I can from moment to moment to shift into the reality I wish to exist in, through mindfulness meditation and daily practice to form habits which get me closer to my goals. As I've become more aware of concepts like co-creation, I've found that life opens up with new possibilities I hadn't conceived of, which has helped me find meaning and reaffirmed my belief in free will and freedom itself.
Practically, that means that I take care of my body's health, I go to work, but I define my own boundaries now. I take time for my own projects regardless of consequence, confident in my ability to handle what creation throws at me. I don't let others' lived experience overshadow my own anymore. I've gotten to experience the feeling of success lately, physically/mentally/spiritually, and it feels wonderful after so many years of struggling.
Basically, choose the one thing most dear to your heart, and go do that.
But these are my views through my filter. Please take them as leads, not conclusions. Apologies that this got so long again, but hey, it's Sunday.
…your ability to appreciate one pursuit or subject will be forever impaired by the existential urgency to “catch ‘em all”.
I realized long ago that I’m addicted to novelty. And I’ve accepted that and I’m okay with it - I love ideas and starting things high on the inspiration and vision for the future, only to lose steam and switch to something else (lack of higher purpose and discipline).
For me, I think it’s all about a drive for significance. So I do a lot cuz I want to matter and be important, make an impact, dent the universe, etc. I don’t want to be an expert in terms of knowledge, but instead in execution and realizing the initial vision. To decide what to go with right now, I’ve come up with the following priority scheme:
0) things where I have passion, highest excitement, engagement, you will not be the best or be an expert if this is not true - non-negotiable step 0 1) youth and time advantage - things that need me you look younger or be unrestricted by family, mortage, energy 2) risk appetite/tolerance advantage - which things are higher risk that I can surely accept now but maybe not in the future when I have more responsibility 3) unlocking other freedoms or opportunities - which things will unlock everything else and make them effortless to start - like exiting a startup with major $$ so you can put it all into ungodly expensive hobbies like becoming an expert rally car racer. I can’t do that financially right now :( 4) what will help myself and my family, friends, tribe in a meaningful way 5) what will help the world in a meaningful way, end suffering 6) discover new truths and scientific knowledge for the benefit of humanity.
It’s essentially a tie-breaking algorithm , shameless hacker plug ;).
I’ll close with a few quotes/ideas:
- with the strategy above you need to set a clear, achievable short term goal with explicit success criteria so you can be honest with yourself if discipline wavers and want to switch to something else. Trace it to the root cause!
- you should go all-in on it. prioritize, but make it short term so you can course correct, do a personal check-in on how it’s going. Give it at least a week, never more than 90 days. Bite sized goals are better because you can have a tighter iteration on your process and see if you’re happy.
- C’s make CEOS because they are smart enough to execute but dumb enough to not doubt themselves, enumerate the ways for failure, be distracted by exciting new ideas, etc.
- people saying “life is short” made me anxious and stressed for a while, and one day my girlfriend said “relax, life is actually pretty long”. I’m having a better time thinking like that.
- the most important part of life is other people. I heard some obscure YouTuber say that about 4 years ago, and I thought it had to be more complex than that. I’m increasingly believing he’s right.
What has been particularity important for me in dealing with this is to not let this desire to be versed in a wide array of subjects lend itself to a state of thrashing. It is my goal to possess a range of knowledge, but I know that it will not be perfectly all encompassing, but good or some is better than none.
When I say thrashing I am referring to precisely the same sort of thrashing which computers might endure, process thrashing, wherein "when the process working set cannot be coscheduled – so not all interacting processes are scheduled to run at the same time – they experience 'process thrashing' due to being repeatedly scheduled and unscheduled, progressing only slowly."[0] I was first introduced to this idea and it's application to human life through the book Algorithms to Live By, by Brian Christian and Thomas L. Griffiths and I try to keep it in mind.
I couple this idea with some advice from Donald Knuth which he extols in the form of an anecdote about his mother (shared by Shuvomoy Das Gupta): "My mother is amazing to watch because she doesn't do anything efficiently, really: She puts about three times as much energy as necessary into everything she does. But she never spends any time wondering what to do next or how to optimize anything; she just keeps working. Her strategy, slightly simplified, is, "See something that needs to be done and do it." All day long. And at the end of the day, she's accomplished a huge amount."
This second bit of advice is useful because it reminds me not to get hung up on optimization or identifying the best possible learning pathway. When you aspire to learn many different things, there's nearly an infinite number of places you can get stuck, you can get so stuck in fact, that you fail to learn very much at all.
The last bit of advice is a general one: pick the subjects which are most fundamental. For example, say I would like to learn about Zoology, Botany, and Marine Biology. It is most advantageous to choose to study Biology first, as it underpins the three. Then, down the line, should I take the time to dig into each subject in particular, my rate of learning will be accelerated. This isn't anything special, and is in fact the basis of most modern STEM education, learn the fundamentals (math, physics, chemistry, biology) etc. and then the later in-depth topics are built upon that foundation.
So, to summarize:
Pick a subject (the more fundamental the better), think (a little bit, but not too much) about how you will approach learning it, and simply begin. If something else comes along and piques your interest, feel free to switch gears and follow that interest, but be sure to avoid thrashing, hopping from subject to subject or task to task so rapidly that you aren't picking up anything at all. Just as the other commenters here said, you will be amazed at just how much knowledge you accumulate over time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrashing_(computer_science)#:...
[1] https://shuvomoy.github.io/blogs/posts/Knuth-on-work-habits-....
This maximizes the amount of what you love that you get to do, and it puts you in a niche where you are uniquely well suited.
Be an expert in one thing + know a little of more other things