If that idea of your lifetime not being enough is stressing you out, Dr David Burns' work on cognitive behavioural therapy might help. Saying you want to be an expert in many things because you are interested in many things could be papering over some deeper anxiety-driven motivations around 'not being good enough' or 'not being worthy of respect' or 'needing to prove yourself to someone' or 'not wanting to be a nobody' or 'wanting to avoid the bullying you used to get' or etc. The Feeling Good podcast[1] is a good audio introduction and has many examples, his book Feeling Great is more of a self-help style written introduction.
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?
I can appreciate that it might be like that for some, but absolutely not for me.
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.
If you were standing at the entrance of a grand amusement park, would you feel despair that you have to choose which ride to take or excitement at having options? If the park were fantastically more grand, so you have no hope of sampling every amusement, does this somehow change your response? Your emotional valence here is your choice, not something intrinsic to the setting. That is what those cognitive behavioral therapists are trying to help with. But, they have to come up with some actionable instruction to convey it to us. I think you are arguing against the chosen rhetorical device rather than an actual principle.
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.
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?
Plant science and husbandry builds upon chemistry/biochemistry
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
What a great and thoughtful response. I really believe too many people — some very ambitious and successful — are being driven by unexamined pathology. I've seen too many examples of people who achieve their goals in terms of money or career or prestige or knowledge and remain miserable because they never took the time to ask themselves these questions.
As opposed to the rest that are miserable without getting the prestige? Everyone is motivated by fears, insecurities, wanting respect of peers, etc. Painting this all as mental illness is a bit stretched.
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.
Sure all that money and respect and sex is just another burden you’re better off without. You should just let go of the bad thoughts that make you desire expertise, that you could become a valued member of society, and instead find the happiness and love from within yourself and go get an ice cream cone at McDonalds. Cum-by-ya. Hallelujah. Whatever.
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.
You don't actually have to be an expert in everything that interests you: For example, you can enjoy music without ever becoming an expert musician. Many people are fascinated by the images coming from the JWST without becoming PhD level astronomers.
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.
Indeed, I am feeling that my lifetime may not be enough to learn all the things I am required to. The general feeling I have is that if I do not do this effort of gaining expertise, I am not fit for life.
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.
"The general feeling I have is that if I do not do this effort of gaining expertise, I am not fit for life."
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.
I'm looking for a dev job now after a few years off... it's painful! I put my hope into each application, hearing nothing back most of the time stings. And all the while time is ticking.
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?
This is a great and wise reply. I too suffer from what you're describing sometimes and I attribute it partly to these sorts of underlying emotional factors.
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.
what an excellent reply. i’ve been working through a lot of these things in therapy, and hadn’t thought of wanting to be an expert as a potential masking of the litany of feelings you mentioned. and thanks for the podcast recommendation
I let my natural curiosity guide me. I used to beat myself up about not being one of those people who have a singular purpose, someone who focuses deeply in one area, but found solace in Susan Fowler's blog post:
"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."
The threads in here about honestly confronting the finite time available and defining goals and understanding why you want expertise are both reasonable and important to think through.
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.
Four Thousand Weeks is a good book that touches on this. It begins with the premise that most people have infinite desires, and all people have finite time, and it's unlikely you will accomplish even 1% of all of your dreams in your finite life. It then talks about how that's okay, because what we choose to spend our time and attention on is what makes us unique and interesting, and explores some ways to prioritize the things that are most important to youm so that you actually do those things.
At the same time, if we lived longer, our achievements can grow non-linearly as we compound skills and insight.
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.
At least for me it's not a matter of "ok" or "not ok". It's just deciding what's best to do! Either Jack of all trades (my current approach) or master of one.
I see a lot of answers that revolve around the question of "how to make the most effective use of the limited time I have". A very rationalistic point of view (no surprise since it's HN).
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!
According to several sources, both scientific and esoteric, intuition (AKA gut feeling) is just underrealized experience. E.g. for intuition to work one have to get a lot experience. Which, in turn, requires time.
True, but going "Yolo gut feeling" can also be a way to stop being stuck and forcing to make a decision.
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.
First, have you asked yourself why you want to be an expert in many things? If it is just to know things, then it doesn't matter; just keep learning until you can't anymore. If it is to apply the knowledge to something, then you can use that fact to determine how much utility over time the knowledge of each thing would have, and focus on the greatest first.
> First, have you asked yourself why you want to be an expert in many things?
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.
Realistically a lot of people who you'd otherwise learn from will avoid discussing things with you because of this behavior. Meanwhile those willing to listen and who aren't as concerned with winning arguments will learn much more than you.
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.
"It is a painful thing to say to oneself: by choosing one road I am turning my back on a thousand others. Everything is interesting; everything might be useful; everything attracts and charms a noble mind; but death is before us; mind and matter make their demands; willy-nilly we must submit and rest content as to things that time and wisdom deny us, with a glance of sympathy which is another act of our homage to the truth." - Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods
My perspective is that I probably won't be an expert in a single field (though there's still time). I spent enough time with Java to be fairly proficient with it. Other than that, I call myself full stack developer and that means that I touched a lot of areas in IT. I'm good Linux user, I can administer Linux servers, I can tinker with OpenBSD, I know quite a lot of languages, I think that I touched every popular language and I'm pretty fluent at JS and C. I'm good enough with databases, I'm know few things about hardware. This year I learned how to provision a k8s cluster and install some things there. This year I tried to get hold on microelectronics and microcontrollers but somewhat failed because of lack of time, though I'll get there eventually.
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'm like that too. I don't think I could actually become a 'real' expert at something that tiny. Way too boring.
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.
Readit News
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?
[1] https://feelinggood.com/list-of-feeling-good-podcasts/
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"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!
[1] https://www.danielgoleman.info/
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
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.