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Comment by Unbeliever69 | Hacker News Reader

I am the consummate jack-of-all-trades. It is a disorder. And it irks me EVERY day that I'm not amazing at one single thing. I am SO envious of people that possess a single-minded focus and the older I get the more I regret not finding that singular passion. The problem is...I get bored with one thing. Or at least, I'm never crossed that painful membrane of boredom to find bliss in single mastery.

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Skills are recursive. If you're jack-of-all-trades, it means that while you're neither good at A, nor B, nor C..., you're good at the combination of X = {A, B, C, ...} ;). Find something for which you need to apply many of the skills you have - single-minded people won't be able to follow you there ;).

Amen to this. I am 29 (I suppose that is still considered young) and I can relate. I feel like I may have a similar disorder. Luckily for me my hand is being forced by my work. I have to know C# and SQL Server for my work, and this forces me to specialize.

My side projects on the other hand consist of F#, Elixir, C#, Python, Java, Unreal Engine playing around with Azure and Firebase. Just a giant list of things I build to 10 - 25% completion. There is this unreasonable and insatiable hunger to understand how EVERYTHING technical works, but only 80 years to learn it all in. So I end up buying books on Kivy (Python), Fsharp, I have 2 books on Elixir, one which I never even started etc etc. Send Help!

P.S. I even have a book on Openstack cause I was like "Wow, that sounds awesome, I must learn all about it." I haven't opened it.

P.P.S This obsession with knowing how to do everything also manifests outside of the digital world. I have a fridge full of kimchi I will never eat, and a laundry full of Mead I will never drink.

I used to buy books to learn things back in the 90's, when docs were hard to find.

Now I find that the best docs are not written books, but online documentation. These days I'd say just play with it. Build an app. Start up the one box openstack devstack. People have gone through a lot of pains to make a simple dev environment work for a lot of different languages/platforms.

Once I get into it, it's less of an abstract idea, and more trying to do something. Having a toy project in mind also helps to build something useful. Over time, your knowledge will simply accrete.

I find I am also addicted to that "ball drop" moment or moment of clarity when you finally realise how something works. Those moments are also a lot more common in the early stages.

I have a similar problem. It bothers me a bit that I'm not amazing at any single thing, but not nearly as much as it bothers me that there are things I can't do well. I have this strange belief that I should be at least competent at every skill there is. (I blame my dad for this, by the way. He is good at everything. :-) )

What do you do as your day job? Do you find that you don't focus on one thing as part of that?

I'd say I'm the opposite. Funnily enough, I'm envious of people who are a jack of all trades because they can choose the right tool for the job. I just do iOS development in my day job and side projects and although I love app development, I find the lack of knowledge on other tools limiting.

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