We’ve all heard the proverb “Jack of all trades, a master of none” which acts as a warning to people who might be spreading themselves too thin and trying to entertain too many things at once, be it learning, hobbies, or business. Forcing yourself to have a narrow focus is crucial for success.

Or is it?

Some people must feel it instinctively, that this is true to an extent, that human beings are by nature generalists. I mean, we quite literally have to be and have had to always be because daily life requires one to be able to do many, many things well. The generalization capabilities of human beings are, at the current time of writing, vastly superior to modern AI; although, to be fair, that kind of comparison is perhaps mute because you can just train as many specialized AI to do the finitely discrete jobs humans do anyways. We’re not infinitely capable generalizers after all.

Getting back and away from AI for one damn second, I am glad to hear confirmation of this from say No Boilerplate in this video. In college, I felt like I had to prove myself that I was really interested in CS and that I wasn’t doing it just because it was popular and had good career prospects. I created a fake internal pressure to really kind of specialize into doing programming and thinking about computer science as much as humanly possible while in college, but that is just not a recipe for success. And obviously I didn’t do that. I didn’t (and couldn’t) grind leetcode, build the next Facebook, or become good at posting on LinkedIn and building a “professional network”, all while maintaining good GPA and have a social life.

As a form of rebellion against the CS one track mind, hell, I went and got minors in math and physics at my college, but let’s be honest my school is not that prestigious and the requirements to achieve those are kind of a joke so I just went for it for boosting my ego. And hey, it did, at the cost of three things: being maidenless, not practicing programming for what I’m most likely going to do for future job, and also incurring legit impostor syndrome because I stretched myself too thin. I can pass the classes, but did I understand and have deep long term retention of the materials in the courses I took? Not really, especially for physics. All that shit is out of the window. In my final year, I took math courses like numerical analysis and operations research, I truly enjoyed them quite a lot! While I don’t think I’ll be applying things like Taylor’s Theorem or Little’s Formula I do miss those times. I would pretend and forget about the real world we live in, where most of us will have to settle for corporate slaves in order to earn enough money to put food on the table and a stable roof over our heads. Way too idealistic. Definitely needed a slap in the face and remind me that I wasn’t a rich white guy like one of my many classmates. You can’t be fucking around and finding “joy in the liberal arts” — you need job security. What’s an intro class in Russian or Dance going to help you besides personal enjoyment? Neural plasticity? Sure.

Lost in the sauce.

And that’s the thing, I still I think you should be a generalist because it makes you better off overall, as cliche as it sounds. If you can afford the time and energy to spend on learning, doing, and practicing skills in other domains, do it and you will not regret it. However, if you are not so lucky and have to worry about rent, mortgage, food, or whatever bills you’ve been locked into, you probably are just going to be a specialist by default. Maybe when you make enough money and have invested that properly, you will be able to afford being a generalist and be happy. Or, just live with your parents and say fuck it, follow your interests — if you are lucky enough for them to let you do that, while you somehow scrape away with some kind of low paying job perhaps that doesn’t matter to you.

Consume everything and make it yours. Be gluttonous.