The importance of developing expertise in several disciplines
Ideally, every 2 to 3 years, you are becoming proficient in a new discipline. You probably have a main discipline that you are focussed on, but you have a side discipline that you are learning.
Carpentry can inform biomedical research. Sales can inform the fight against medical tyranny. Principles of online privacy can inform economics.
How An Important Technology Came To Be
In fact, that final one on the list is exactly how Bitcoin came to be. A person reasonably expert in concepts of online privacy (called cypherpunk theories) and reasonably proficient in concepts of Austrian theory economics (a branch that explains the importance of hard money and free markets), delved into the idea of combining them and impressively placed several Austrian school theories into modern practice. Nothing like it had ever been done.
He merely combined two disciplines he was familiar with. And in this era of extreme specialization, what he did went a long way.
Your Life Experiences May Combine To Make You Better Than An Expert, So Be Broad In Your Tastes For Learning
It was this simple: 1.) identify a problem in life, 2.) ask yourself what you know from all of your life experiences that might apply to that problem.
The deeper you go into a subject, the more expert you become. You may even reach 99% proficiency in which you understand every nook and cranny of that field with precision. But often 80% is good enough.
And with your 80% proficiency, you can be something that few are in this in-bred era of over-specialization. You can be a cross-pollinator.
That is truly powerful — First of all because it works; Second of all because of how surprisingly uncommon it is.
But Please, At All Cost, Don’t Be A Dabbler!
But don’t be a dabbler. That is not what I’m calling for. When you start something, start it judiciously. Resolve not to quit it for at least 6 months. Keep with it. Dig in. Go hard and go fast. Learn the material.
If after 6 months you are still saying to yourself “This isn’t for me!” well then this isn’t for you. Don’t be the person who quits after 6 weeks. That person develops few skills. He is more correct at being called the jack of all trades, the ace of none, or better yet a dilettante, for 6 weeks is no amount of time to become much more than a deuce in this field.
This field that you quickly dropped deserved more. You deserve more.
Experts dedicated their lives to it. There is obviously therefore meaty stuff in that field. And if you understand learning curves, you know that if you don’t last long in the field, you will not even have gone far enough to have experienced much, because you are still dealing with the learning curve.
Don’t waste your time and the time of others by giving that field or any field less than 6 months of your time before you call it quits. And then do so joyfully. “Been there done that, gave it my all long enough to get past the learning curve, and I know that it’s not for me.”
Don’t let anyone guilt you in that. And if it’s good, stay 2 or 3 years in that pursuit and then know when to leave — when the joy starts to wane or the returns start to diminish, you may find a better use of your time elsewhere. But again, I encourage a main field in which you are constantly developing life-long expertise, alongside these ancillary fields.
It’s important that you develop expertise in several fields. It’s important to do that every 2 or 3 years in at least one new field.
Allan Stevo is the bestselling author of “Face Masks Hurt Kids.”