The Disadvantages of Specialization
The dangers of planning your life too much.
If you’ve ever read the biographies of mathematicians, you’ll notice most of the time, they weren’t trying to study math as a discipline. They were just solving small puzzles that caught their attention. Like the number of windows in a house. Or quick ways you could add every number between 1 and 100.
They weren’t working on problems they didn’t care about. They focused on problems that caught their interest.
Over time, working on these problems broadened their skill sets until you could capture what they knew with a single label:
“Mathematician”.
So what’s the lesson?
If you try to plan your life in a top-down way by telling yourself you’re gonna become a “computer programmer” or learn “statistics” you’ll likely fail.
And you’ll fail for different reasons:
You’ll fail because you won’t steer your life towards the things you find meaningful.
You’ll fail because you’ll be confined to a narrow role, with a set of motivations you may not necessarily share with other people.
And you’ll fail, because you won’t solve problems anybody (including yourself) cares about. Instead, you’ll become good at solving problems nobody has.
Building your life in a top-down way rarely works out the way we intended. Striving to learn a domain like “math” or “computer science” alone cannot capture what we want. You would be much better off starting with local problems you care about.
That’s what the greatest scientists and thinkers did. They found success by pursuing local problems. And as they solved these problems, they accumulated expertise and an endless supply of novelty.
A local problem is a problem that directly affects you. It’s the small minutiae you can’t help but observe—the problems you run into every day as you wake up and come home.
It’s the leaky sink in your faucet, the pain in the back of your neck, the blurriness in your eyes.
It’s the little pouch of fat in your stomach, the clothes in your closet that you no longer wear. The way frisbees spin in the air and dogs walk in particular motions. The hidden fabric of reality.
It’s the problems that occasionally pop up into your conscious awareness that you briefly acknowledge before moving on with the rest of your day.
These are local problems.
And the interesting thing about local problems: Sometimes they scale in complexity.
You might discover the superficial trivialities of life to be a far more profound problem than you expected. What does it mean to solve your neck pain? What kinds of lifestyle changes will you have to do? What sorts of downstream effects will occur? What does it take to heal an injury?
You’ll discover there’s all sorts of things you didn’t know about, that you needed to know in order to solve a problem.
You’ll become more competent, in a broad and general kind of way as you solve these local problems. Maybe you’ll pick up a book about building better habits. Or install an app that trains you to be less anxious. You’ll search for the specific knowledge you need to solve your specific problem, your specific pain.
You’ll become more competent in those domains of life that directly affect you, discarding anything unnecessary, irrelevant, and dumb (reality has a way of eliminating bad ideas).
So I wouldn’t recommend you study math, physics, biology, or any of that. I recommend just sitting down and thinking about a problem you’re trying to solve. See where it goes. Pick up the math or physics, or programming you need along the way to solve those problems.
Over time, you’ll pick up specific skills to solve specific problems. And your life will unfold, organically, “inefficiently” towards that which is most meaningful to you.
What a misfortune, although you are made
for fine and great works
this unjust fate of yours always
denies you encouragement and success;
that base customs should block you;
and pettiness and indifference.And how terrible the day when you yield
(the day when you give up and yield),
and you leave on foot for Susa,
and you go to the monarch Artaxerxes
who favorably places you in his court,
and offers you satrapies and the like.And you accept them with despair
these things that you do not want.Your soul seeks other things, weeps for other things;
the praise of the public and the Sophists,
the hard-won and inestimable Well Done;
the Agora, the Theater, and the Laurels.How can Artaxerxes give you these,
where will you find these in a satrapy;
and what life can you live without these.— “The Satrapy”, Constantine P. Cavafy