Kids have a funny way of putting things in perspective. My niece asked me why I was collecting hobbies like Pokemon cards the other day and I told her something about staying fresh and exploring. The question lingered though and the more I thought about it, the more I had to face some facts.
Starting new things is implicitly encouraged more than getting depth
The tech industry gives us some bad habits. Since tools and best practices change so fast, we’re not encouraged to go deep into anything but we need to know everything. That’s why the job descriptions for software engineers look like a course catalog. It is.
Sure, if you stick with it over a decade or so, you’ll get depth in all the things and start to specialize to some degree. But specializations have been frowned upon long enough to where I’ve accidently become an expert in a few different things out of nothing but necessity.
Deliberately approaching something with the purpose of mastery isn’t the message anymore. We’ve been taught that the only way to stay relevant is to keep up with and maybe get ahead of the trends.
The fundamentals never change though. Depth is what creates the trends.
Getting depth is hard
Picking up something new is much easier than trying to go a step further into an existing thing. Almost everything is made to get you to try it at least once, but after you reach a 102 level it gets harder to find help.
The reason for this is over time you know enough concepts to start doing meaningful projects and you usually start learning for the sake of doing a thing instead of just learning. If you don’t have anything in mind to do, going deeper doesn’t make much sense because it’s arbitrary. There’s nothing you’re trying to do with it so you could go any direction with no real purpose behind it.
Most of the best and advanced learning comes from facing new challenges and pushing what you know to the limits. That’s why most of us don’t go deep. The resources and help available become scarce as you go deeper because you are doing things not many people do.
That’s part of what’s kept me stuck in the loop of learning new stuff all the time. It’s just easier and that muscle to keep pushing starts to atrophy when the reward hasn’t been there for so long.
It feels like you’re missing out
Life has so many interesting things to choose from that going wide feels like the only way to not miss out. The reality is that you’re going to miss out on a lot of things. I’m trying to accept that. It’s better to spend time on a few things and get a higher level of mastery than get a surface level of everything.
In the process of pursuing one hobby, you’ll find all of the other hobbies and worlds attached to it. This is how my career has taken so many twists and turns. You find a weak spot in your skills and dive into that and then you come up for air somewhere almost unrelated to the original skill.
This is a slow energy drain because it switches your focus too much. There’s always a new thing that people jump on and it’s ok to be a little behind. You can’t be at the cutting edge of everything. You will miss out and there’s a strong chance that you’ll forget about it anyways. Think about all of the things you wanted to learn or do last year. Are there some that you don’t mind missing out on?
I started this year off with about 18 things I wanted to learn or do and now that I’m over halfway through the list, my niece’s question made me stop and think about if I want to finish it. On one hand, I like to follow through with what I say I’ll do. On the other hand, I also know not to give into the sunk cost fallacy.
The compromise I have in mind is to spend the next month or so speed-running the list and then immediately pruning it to see what stands out.