49 Comments
User's avatar
Anushka Dixit's avatar

Great piece!

Mohd Arqam's avatar

I think best thing you can do for yourself is to feed your curiosity

ALEXANDER's avatar

Absolutely, I heard Naval say something similar in a podcast I was listening to recently, and I have a piece coming in the next ~3 weeks about this very idea

Mohd Arqam's avatar

You replied! Thanks. Waiting for it.

ALEXANDER's avatar

Look for it August 9 😉

Francisco's avatar

Never believed in putting myself in a box and only master one thing. Life's short but its long to explore your endless curiosity. I think you can master one domain, and be pretty good in three, for example.

Great piece, keep it up!

ALEXANDER's avatar

Life is indeed too short to tunnel yourself in 🥂

Osten Jap's avatar

Why are you always so busy to strive for excellence?

Me: Fear of dying a normie

ALEXANDER's avatar

I feel you fr 🙏

Master Wu-Wei Jokes's avatar

A scholar is just a professional coward holding a tiny flashlight in a dark room, terrified of stepping into the unknown. Don't be a one-trick pony. Master the art of awareness, drop the fear, and treat the whole dark universe as your personal playground. See ya in the deep water!

Aiden's avatar

Seems problematic. Scholars aren’t problems, and we need scholars to help others light up those dark rooms more completely. It would be much harder to live on the journey without those paving every step.

RT's avatar

Great read!

I think what convinced me that polymaths are the ones, was when I saw that every so called great person had multiple interests.

But I also think, some people are born with this intrinsic curiosity, to know more and genuinely be fascinated by it.

Almost like an intrinsic pull.

Like there is a difference between people who are doing it because they have to check it off a to-do list, and those who are doing it because they genuinely have an intrinsic pull for it.

ALEXANDER's avatar

Definitely! It seems ambitious people are naturally curious because ambition is sort of forcing yourself onto the world, and thus demands a great understanding of said world, which is why they’re always asking questions.

BlackNightshade's avatar

I think the otherwise. Curiosity is stemmed from environment which primes a person a desire to change. This environment must be unoptimized enough to feel mildly uncomfortable to be in yet hints another better way. Curiosity also needs to be buttressed with the satisfactory of basic necessity like food, health, housing.

Sosa's avatar

Burnout is an imbalance of excellence.

You put all your focus in to work, and forgot everything else:

Excellent thoughts. Excellent recovery. Excellent health. Excellent mindset. Excellent self belief. Excellent resilience. Excellent amounts of joy. Excellent self-image.

Aequa & Co.'s avatar

The idea that disciplines are really different ways of learning to see is the heart of this. The goal is not to collect interests like trophies, it is to let them inform a body of work, a point of view, and eventually a life that could not have been built by a narrow specialist alone.

Bandit's avatar

Lovely Article!! This gets me thinking of how the term "Jack-of-all-trades" came from and how it not such a bad thing to be.

Amaan Malik's avatar

The 'black box' metaphor is such a powerful way to think about learning. Every new curiosity really does add another light.

Dronom!'s avatar

Reading stuff like this always gets me so excited. Let us conquer everything!

ALEXANDER's avatar

let’s get it baby!

Oluwatoni Akintola's avatar

brilliant.

bloomingwords's avatar

Great read. Thanks for putting this out in the world.

ALEXANDER's avatar

Means a lot 🙏

Khadijah's avatar

I'm in my very early 20s, and I hear a lot of opinions about choosing one thing. I haven't decided how I can make money with my multiple interests and find happiness by picking only one thing 😭

Jason Thompson's avatar

This is amazing. I have always felt imposter syndrome because I like to start new things and I have felt less than because there are experts I am measuring myself against. Reading this made me feel like I am not spreading myself thin, but exploring the unknown. I also love all the people in the comments. Thank you! This is a good group of people.