I want to be an expert in many things but my lifetime won't be enough

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?

[1] https://feelinggood.com/list-of-feeling-good-podcasts/

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."

Source: https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/5/21/life-without-a-d...

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.

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!

[1] https://www.danielgoleman.info/

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.

"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.

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

Ecclesiastes 9:10

Basically, do the best work you can at whatever it is you need to do. In the end none of it matters.

Most people overestimate what they can do in one year, and underestimate what they can do in ten years. - Derek Sivers [1]

[1] https://sive.rs/donkey

I had the same problem, and I rephrased the "problem". If everyday I do things that make me feel I get better at becoming an expert in things that interest me, and I do that consistently my whole life, then that will be a life well-lived. Doing that gives me purpose and satisfaction every single day.

"Expertise" is not something that exists per se, so as a goal, it is unreachable. In fact, the more I have put this approach to use, the more I realize how many things exist that I will never become an expert on. It also makes me realize that whatever I have the most actual expertise on is but a tiny tiny grain in the vast sea of knowledge in that one specific field!

I don't lol. I just try know my physical and mental limits (know thyself). then I try to do things one at a time, and go until I'm satisfied or tired or hit my limits. Its just life you do what you want on your 80 years.

Annoying thing is that my limits have changed as I got older and had children. So I often had to reassess the time that I can put into my interests. And ok that is life we all get old.

I can completely relate to you. Curiosity, fun of education and adventure of building cool things is what I live by too.

What I personally do for this is I go by what I call chaotic learning. Spending chunks of my time in different things based whatever interest me at that moment. For example, I am currently only trying to gain expertise in software engineering. I am super interested in math, philosophy, history, science etc too. But currently, I want to focus specifically on software and then after a certain point (idk when that point will be, maybe after I've financial freedom, maybe not), I will explore other fields too. But in software itself, there are so many things to do and learn too. So what I do is, today I am working on a side project to do with the terminal. After a few days, once I publish a v0.1, I will work a bit on an open source project I'm interested in. Post that, I might do some DSA. Post that, maybe back to my side project adding another new feature. Then maybe read one of the many books I want to read. Then maybe try to learn and build my own language and so on. You learn/build different things from time to time, based on what you really want to pick. That works the best for me. Chaos.

A lot of people here are going to talk negatives and prioritization and purpose, but I personally also want to be practically omniscient, and you should strive for it too. You need strategies if you want to know a lot. Certainly focused things like classes and intensive study are necessary from time to time (and especially early in life), but we can't do that our whole lives, nor do we want to.

What we need is to develop habits of constant learning.

Here is one essential thing you can do to start learning a lot:

Fill your home with dual-language books, and keep opening them. Put a stack on your toilet.

By dual-language books, I mean books with the original language on one side, and your native language on the other. You'll find that the entirely of the classical pantheon, as well as much great literature and philosophy from many cultures is available in this form.

Spreading math books around your house helps too, of course, along with those on the other topics you want to master.

Keep opening them. Life is long, each day you can learn a bit more.

"Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves."

I built an app to model this out. It forecasts your future down to the millisecond. It's super simple right now, but has a "time machine" function to see where you'll be in 5 / 10 / 30 years -- and whole life. i.e. You might spend 20,000 hours in the bathroom and 10,000 hours writing novels.

What's valuable to me and the people who have used it is to compare how much time you'll spend on type 1 hedonistic fun vs. type 2 accretive fun.

Free / easy. https://app.sundialcalendar.com/

I’m curious about a lot of things, and always eager to learn something new, but at no point have the desire to become an expert. I’m hardly an expert in my every day job. I’m content with exploring. I can fix my bicycle if it’s broken, but I can’t fix any bicycle. I can also fix my plumbing up to a point, or make general home fixes like paint a room, or maintain the wooden shutters, but I can’t compete with a professional painter. I just don’t see the point of investing the extra time to go in all the way. It’s not like I’ll change career any time soon.

Do you want to become an expert in very many different things? Just becoming an expert in one field can take a good fraction of your lifetime, so you may want to consider that.

A useful mental model is to already see what you are good at, and draw (mentally) curves of your competence (I wrote about it in https://newsletter.smarter.blog/p/curves-of-competence). And then use it to figure out where to amplify.

Also note that becoming an expert is a lot of hard work.

In that case, first become an expert in life-span extension!

I used to get this with books until I came across the Japanese concept of Tsundoku which helped identify and calm the anxiety. Tsundoku (積ん読) is the acquisition of reading materials and letting them pile up without reading them.

Don't decide which things to work on and risk analysis paralysis along with a string of other negative feelings.

Let curiosity guide you, explore as many domains as you're able and willing to and become competent with most of them. The more domains you weave into the web of knowledge, notwithstanding the lack of expertise, the higher the probability you'll find links across the ever expanding network. Maybe delve deep into the foundation, occasionally or frequently, for you could stumble into something new. Consider teaching or talking about your knowledge; open a blog, write a book, whatever. It'll help others as well as you, now and later.

In the end, whether through our descendants, works or knowledge, we're all child of that instinct to leave something after our death, of which your post is yet another manifestation.

I think this is an unhealthy desire, as it's impossible to achieve. You should replace it with its source, like "I want to provide wisdom to my community", and then let that guide you in prioritizing your time

Ars longa, vita brevis

"skilfulness takes time and life is short"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_longa,_vita_brevis

Before you have family: what's fun and will improve the state of the world (not necessarily the whole world, just bits you can reach).

After having family, what benefits them may reasonably be the higher priority.

You need to make your peace with the fact that there will always be vastly more things you don't know than things that you do. That would be true even if your life were 10x longer or 100x longer. Your life span is not the limiting factor. The size of your brain is the limiting factor. At the very least, there are 8 billion other brains out there, and your brain cannot contain all of the knowledge contained in those 8 billion others.

But there are some fields of knowledge that give you more leverage towards obtaining expertise than others. Being an expert in Lisp, for example, will not make you an expert in C++. But it will let you realize that becoming an expert in C++ is very likely to be a waste of time, because being an expert in C++ means knowing a lot of random and mostly arbitrary trivia that has accumulated over many decades of bad decision-making.

There are a lot of examples of subjects that give you similar kinds of leverage. There are probably a dozen core topics that allow you to cut vast swathes through most of human knowledge: basic physics (GR and QM), the theory of computation and complexity theory, game theory and the theory of evolution (and how these are related) is probably the 80/20 list. So if you really want to maximize your expertise I would start by focusing on a few of those topics.

But, as others have pointed out, you really should take a step back and ask yourself why you want to become an expert in many things. Do you want expertise for its own sake, or do you want the prestige that comes from having others perceive you as an expert? Because those are two very different goals.

I'd recommend reading https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41795733-range if only to see why being a generalist is another option. You should feel free to allow yourself the flexibility to switch your interests as you change throughout your life.

There's and old book "On the shortness of life" that you might want to read as part of your journey.

Ultimately, finding one's focus is the hardest and most rewarding part of life.

Mastery is often encouraged - even with tropes like “Jack of trades master of none” used to deliver insults to some of us - but saying used in full phrase is “a jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.” ~ Shakespeare

Most of us won’t be polymaths per se but we now live in a world where information and knowledge are in abundance in whatever field of interest and for the most part it’s almost “free”.

With abundance and accessibility (regardless of your class to some extend) can create anxiety and depression or even paralysis since prioritizing shifts entirely on you - mentally as opposed to life’s circumstances forcing you to a particular path because that’s or was the only option. I believe this is a major source of anxiety and even depression in the internet age.

My point is, unlike many commenters, I see your point and even share what you’re feeling to some extend. Most people assume it’s just a matter of priorities, killing FOMO and perhaps being content with life you have now or whatever life has handed you, but it’s not that simple. It’s much deeper.

Perhaps you’re dealing with Chronophobia [0] of some sort that need to be addressed. For me it manifested itself as fear of not having enough time to read all the books that interests me - even if I start reading 24/7 now! My wishlist is insanely long and growing, yet I’m hoarding books and magazines I bought years ago because I simply don’t have time! With help of an expert, I was able to trace my fear to growing up in third-word county in a village setting; curious about everything but with zero access to books / library or entertainment for that matter. I read everything I got my hands to kill time and quench my curiosity and now I have access to all books in the word but no time!

[0] - https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22579-chronop...

I would say you should work on things that will have a bigger impact. Some things might be fun/interesting but the impact will be extremely low (or none at all).

Another tip is to vigilantly avoid time wasting traps like instagram, facebook, video games, pointless youtube videos, etc. This will give you a LOT more time to pursue other things.

But yeah, this is a tough burden for us to bear. I mean, it is literally the oldest problem in human existence: our short time on this earth. It reminds me of a song from ancient Greece (literally the oldest surviving complete musical composition)[1]:

  While you live, shine
  have no grief at all
  life exists only for a short while
  and Time demands his due.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph

Perfection is the enemy of good enough.

I don't know how old you are, but someday, you are going to be approaching seventy years old, and look back on the long arch of your life and realize how much effort you put into things that didn't really matter at all, and didn't put enough effort into the things that do, like art, love, and friendship.

I've spent the last forty years of my life working on embedded systems in telecom, on technologies that reigned in the marketplace for some brief period of time, then were relegated to the dustbin of history. My father-in-law worked at IBM, and within ten years of his retirement, everything he ever worked on was obsolete.

Other than fundamental math and physics, everything is ephemeral.

Love, art, family, and friends will endure. All else is dust within the span of your lifetime.

I just go with whatever my jack-of-all trades wants to do that day. Right now it's mastering French, before it was playing drums and bass in a hardcore punk band, and before that it was finance and the market, and before that using a new XPen tablet to draw panels for a graphic novel concept my brother wrote as well as some F/64-meets-Cézanne style landscapes. All while working on a startup, and trying to maintain a social life. I rotate through these and others throughout the years.

I know I most likely won't be the best at any of them in my lifetime, but really it's not a competition for me and I'm having fun.

Only piece of advice is avoid content mills like Tiktok and Instagram that are designed to get you addicted and keep you from doing the things you love – although on the other hand those things can spark inspiration!

What makes you think you can be an expert in even one thing?

This can be guided by knowing one's purpose in life, and by knowing that life does not end when this mortal lifetime ends, but we will actually continue to exist; and it is possible, based on our individual choices, that our learning, service, and growth can continue. For me, this helps take the pressure off. I wrote how I know this, at my simple web site (in profile).

There are ways to use our time that brings happiness in things that last and are not transient. A scripture says: men are that that they might have joy. Another says that what we learn by our diligence in this life will remain with us in the world to come. So it's definitely not a waste, to learn, and serve others with our time.

After doing some camping I started to see life differently. You need to choose carefully what you will carry in your backpack. Yes, we enjoy to do and learn a lot of things, but we need to prioritize what is the most important for us.

I'm at the end of my life. At 25 I decided to get really good at one or two things so I could at least make a living when needed. It was hard to drop other goals but I knew that I could get hired if I was better than 80% of fellow job candidates.

Now that I'm officially retired I'm STILL trying to achieve expertise in multiple areas, but it feels good to know that I was able to support my family and build a retirement fund b/c of my modest expertise.

Even if you had unlimited time it’s unlikely you’d become an expert in many things, even if many only means 3-5.

I know this isn’t very scientific, but as someone who’s struggled with this same question I would suggest just diving into any one of the things that you’re interested in. From there let your instincts and intuition naturally decide what you continue doing and what you abandon.

I’ve learned that it’s hard to force continued work in any area that feels like a slog. Our personalities are tuned to prefer certain activities or fields of study over others.

Find what feels natural and go, go, go.

Prioritize what you love to do, love to work on. You will naturally become an expert in the areas you like to do.

Also good ideas aren’t vague, “I want to be an expert in many things” is too vague for an attainable goal.

I try to work on what I find most interesting, and am capable of doing. Stuff like single photon path distance stuff and LIDAR is really cool, and no doubt I could spend the whole weekend reading about it, but that's not easily within reach given my background (could be wrong). However, there are topics that are closely related to my job skills, and if I push hard on them I should be able to move my career in that direction. I'm a backend engineer, so topics like compilers, distributed systems, or databases are what I'm most interested in. All really cool tech that have deep academic domains and rich histories and very technical implementations.

My general approach is to take tiny steps in the direction I want to go everyday, ie, use the power of habit. This has several advantages, but mostly it's just easier for me if studying is a habit. Right now, that means doing a LeetCode problem every day to stay sharp for job interviews, reading about databases, and starting a new project where I implement a database myself, probably in Rust, so I need to learn Rust as well.

I do generally agree that there isn't enough time to spend on what you want, and work takes up way too much time, but in my experience accepting your limitations and learning to live a balanced life with devotion to tech interests and hobbies has been essential to staying healthy. Put another way, I don't want a crazy job where I grind it out for 65+ hours a week and burn out in 11 months, burn out is very unhealthy for me. Instead, my philosophy is one of sustainable daily movement, setting myself up for working not 2 more years, but 20.

depth first search is a perfectly cromulent way to live.

my heuristic: does this work serve others? do i have to struggle at wanting to do it or do i struggle to stop working?

Usually this means you may probably get distracted easily. So you are good at maths and physics, but then there is this new concept on software engineering and what you do? maybe you switch and forgot for a while about the last topic you where becoming an expert.

There is one thing you are doing constantly and that is: Learning. You are becoming one of the best at learning a new topic quickly.

So is not really as in susans blog post that we are never going to have a single destiny... our destiny is to be the best at learning new topics in record time. This is certainly useful at a research team and new knowledge areas can really laverage someone like that. It's like the category theory expert who can found relations between mathematical objects.

My mindset towards this comes from an stoic maybe buddhist kind of perspective mainly influenced by Thich Nhan Nhat: So you want to be an expert in many things but there is no time for that? cool, embrace it, hug that feeling, accept it you don't need to suffer about it and maybe you already know this and you are looking for practical advice to get more done right?

So that is what I do, I embrace this fact, breath it out, and continue with the topic at hand.

Now getting back at the distractibility-factor... the real problem is when this starts making us not deliver important things here i'm with the person who commented about systems. Atomic Habits is a good book to make those systems and make it simpler for our biased existence to follow a predesigned path daily just as if you were your own parent and designed systems for the little you, the one that have to make decisions daily.

Honestly some psilocybin have helped me understanding this... and micro-doing it seems to add clarity and helps on the letting go.

> I want to be an expert in many things but my lifetime won't be enough

> If you are this kind, how do you decide which things to work on?

First step:

- You need to be an expert in prioritisation!

Well, I figured it’d make most sense to work on eternal life first.

But I’ve found that to be tangential to what I’m actually interested in, so I’m still procrastinating.

Pick one field and start practicing everyday, you'll be amazed what you can achieve on one thing in one year with even only 2hr daily practice.

Just yesterday I was reading Introduction to computing systems by Patt&Pattel when I realized: I'll never finish this book.

I have other big books lying around my home: OSTEP, Algo Design Manual by Skienna, SICP, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Computer Systems A programmer perspective. They are all wonderful, that's why I bought them in print, but I'll never gonna finish them.

On top of that I'm doing a course on Docker. Learning more about Go etc.

So to answer your question. I no longer decide on what things to learn based on them being finisheable. I pick whatever I want to do today. Life is too short to do things you don't enjoy.

I'll never gonna finish my projects, but I have something to do everyday. I'm grateful for that.

Sometimes being an expert is not as hard as you think. If by expert, you mean competent enough to contribute then it is doable. It is hard to get acclaim in multiple fields. Building that status is a life long endeavor. But doing something self-actualizing in multiple fields with competence is totally achievable.

I personally want to write a book, record an album, publish as first author in a tier 1 research conference and patent it, create a useful product with real commercial appeal, perform a standup special and be a great educator. As long as I don't care about citations, billboards or best seller lists it is all achievable.

I got the paper/patent out and am on my way to building a useful product of my own. I am getting better at the drums and jamming, have performed short skit comedy on stage and make sure to write long form stuff on useless internet forums. My educational pursuits are lagging, but I do try to mentor half a dozen people at any given point in time.

I didn't start with most until I was an adult too. As of now, it feels achievable. But my ability to achieve it is a purely internal pursuit, which helps. My natural ADHDness also helps. Ask me again in 30 years, maybe it'll be a good time to write about how I tried to do 20 things and succeeded/failed.

The key is to put yourself within easy access of these activities and be content with little wins. I wrote skit comedy when i was with fellow drama kids. I play drums now that i have a garage. I taught when my prof needed summer volunteers. I stubnornly seeked a role at the intersection of research and industry to find easy opportunities for novel applied research. The fun is in the journey. A healthy dose of self-delusion saying you don't care about the outcome also helps. I could go into a long tangent on the powers of self-delusion....but I'll leave that for another day.

If you have the privilege of not having a shit day job I'd say to follow your instincts. My love and my passion is producing a niched genre of music, I'm very good at it, but it doesnt pay my bills so unfortonately I have to have a daily job. So I'm accepting that's my destiny as I get older and I don't really care about being an expert at it anymore.

Becoming an expert in one thing takes a lot of time and effort, and this must be maintained even after reaching the goal. But getting a reasonable understanding of many things is not too bad. E.g. working through a freshman level physics text will give you a pretty good (or above average, at least) understanding of the field of physics, and this could be done in a span of months. Maybe try something like this for one subject after another. It could be that this amount of knowledge satisfies you for a given subject and you don't need to go further. But if it doesn't satisfy you, move on to more material. If there really are things you want to spend the time and energy on to reach expert level, you will naturally find them this way. And I suspect that list of things will be a lot smaller than when you started.

Is expertise the means, or the end? How would be an expert in x or y improve your day-to-day life?

Counterpoint: on a whim over Christmas I bought a flute. I don't play a musical instrument, I've no particular musical talents, but I've been working at it consistently if not deeply, half an hour a day, every day, since. I will never, ever be an expert at the flute. I will be better at it though; there are pieces I can play in August which I couldn't play in July. It adds to my life. If the goal were to become an _expert_ flautist then a) I would be delusional but b) it would no longer be a nice little interlude in the day. Were I to magically mature into a concert-level flautist, _would I enjoy giving concerts?_ Pretty sure the answer is no. Expertise is neither a realistic nor desirable goal.

Expertise / knowledge doesn't really matter. It's gone when your lifetime ends.

Pick something else that remains. Impact.

Take a look at https://80000hours.org/ for some inspiration.

  You have 80,000 hours in your career.

  This makes it your best opportunity to have a positive impact on the world.

  If you’re fortunate enough to be able to use your career for good, but aren’t sure how, our in-depth guide can help you:

    Get new ideas for high-impact careers
    Compare your options in terms of impact
    Make a plan you feel confident in

  It’s based on 10 years of research alongside academics at Oxford. We’re a nonprofit, so everything we provide is free.

I am this kind. Jeez, how old are you and how many life-shorting conditions do you have stacked against you? My strategy has always been to visit each hobby round robin. I'll spend x weeks on music until I'm not feeling it or I finish something, then switch to animation and do the same, then game programming, etc, etc. I've always felt like there's way, way, way, way too much time in a life time but that's because I spend half of it suffering crippling depression. I'm supposed to be working on animation today but I'm here. Imagine how many planets I'd have conquered single handedly if Eliezer Yudkowsky had never started mentioning this frikkin site. Time to go make some use of that freedom.to subscription.

You might want to examine the _expert_ part of that statement. What exactly does that mean to you?

I have a great many interests, and I shift to focusing between them pretty regularly (and have for many years).

I enjoy all of them, but I likely won’t make any meaningful impact or win an award or have people ask my opinion in any of them. I only do them because I enjoy them.

If you’re truely honest, your lifetime isn’t enough to truly know anything - one subject or many subjects. You’ll pass away, and all your work will be forgotten in time eventually - no matter what. Life is impermanent.

So, my random internet advice: if you find one subject you really like, go deep. If you have a lot of interests, go wide. If you want a fancy job and people to fawn over how intelligent you are, be born rich.

That's the art in it.

It's a beautiful fact that your lifetime won't be enough for everything you want to do. It means what you choose actually has meaning and love behind it. It's sacred in a way infinity isn't.

What brings you joy on a daily basis? I’m a black belt in Jiu Jitsu and as my mastery continues to deepen it just becomes even more fun and rewarding and I now have a global network of extraordinary people. It’s been well with the thousands of hours.

The best advice I ever got on this was to notice the things that nobody else wants to deal with that seem important. Those are opportunities. It turns out, some of them are pretty fun.

And after that have hobbies that have as little to do with your job as possible.

I like being a jack-of-all-trades too, but it is taxing. My way of dealing with my insatiable thirst for knowledge is to pick a topic/problem/project or two at a time. It's hard but without focus I don't get anywhere.

Assuming “expert” is a comparative scale, look for intersections. You might be a decent rock climber and a decent data scientist, but the world authority on data science applied to route planning on a mountainside.

The first 20 hours -- how to learn anything by Josh Kaufman -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY

You can be a top 10% in any given field with this. 20 hrs is worth the effort on skills you want to learn.

My personal advice - Learn only if you put that skill into use immediatly for your good or for the greater good of the society around you. Growth for the sake of growth is the mindset of a virus

I'm actively developing and socializing a thought pattern at this moment that directly addresses this called omnidisciplinary thinking (or Thinking OMNI). Omnidisciplinary thinking is a generic, holistic, nonlinear thought pattern that focuses on blending insights between two or more areas which seem unrelated yet actually share a thought pattern structure by focusing on the similarities between them. In essence, instead of trying to learn many things, learn the patterns of information and how to apply those patterns.

I was this kind in my youth. I felt like my brain was this incredibly powerful cannon, floating in a force cradle, swiveling wildly in all directions, "targeting... targeting... targeting..." all I had to do was locate the target and fire, but I could never locate the target.

What happened was interesting, but perhaps not applicable to you. The best advice I can give you is to find ways to benefit others. That's the open secret of life: one's own happiness flows from bringing happiness to others (self and other are ultimately illusions, All are One.)

The project of your soul is more immense and more important than expertise.

What kind(s) of expertise do you want to realize? You could pursue expertise in a trade, starting as an apprentice then working your way with experience into master status (software, plumbing, electrical, etc). The advanced degrees are relative, but costly, shortcuts to specific domains of expertise (MBA, PhD, MD, etc). Then there’s expertise that can be pursued as hobbies - gardening, woodworking, cooking, sewing, etc.

Have you made a list of how you’d like to spend your time each week? Over years and decades, the time devoted to learning adds up!

Some decent advice here already, so I'll provide something from another angle by just picking something for you. That is, if you continue to be bothered by this, and think you have the actual capability to become an expert in multiple things (rather than a fanciful desire), first become an expert in longevity therapy research and help bootstrap yourself and the rest of the species into having enough time to pursue whatever you/others want.

I’m the same way. My only piece of advice: don’t let ‘sucking at’ at a hobby preclude you from garnering enjoyment from it!

Truly the journey is the destination in the human experience.

Get a paid job with experts who enjoy sharing their knowledge and thought processes. Work hard and gain expertise, then share it yourself. Transition from one domain to a related, or step up a higher level. That's the money part. Make sure to have a few, true hobbies with fun, dedicated, and serious folks. But most importantly, be an expert in living a fulfilling, wholesome life with people where love and friendship is the main theme.

Find a problem you are capable of solving. Make sure the problem has a paying audience and is worth your while. Work on the solution to that problem. Focus! Learn what you have to learn to come up with the solution and sell it.

(Put off learning all you need to know about investing, health, and science. You can spend the entire day without getting any work done. Once you're independently wealthy you can spend your time as you wish.)

Look into Oliver Burkeman's Time Management for Mortals, I personally listen to his audio series on the Waking Up app which you can try for free[1] (I'm not affiliated with them). You are a finite mortal, you can't do everything you want, but you have the power to choose.

[1] https://dynamic.wakingup.com/pack/PKDAFBB

Ah yes. I phrase this as wanting to duplicate myself many times over. Much to do, little time.

I'm attempting to put a dent into increasing our timelines (longevity) with my current project, Guava. The other way to get more time is to experience more in the same time, and for this we need improved brains and interfaces. I'll be ambitious and put my effort into these things because it will allow me to do more if successful.

I‘m a generalist. I know I don’t have time to be an expert in everything. I buy a lot of books about a lot of subjects I’m interested in, but I don’t have the time to read all of them.

But when some work comes my way, the large bookshelf comes in handy, because the books‘ authors knew more than I do.

Sometimes I just buy a book to see if some technology would fit my use case or not. I think it’s faster and cheaper than to dig into online documentation.

Is your lifetime not enough or could the resources to become an expert be better?

Looking at sports, it becomes obvious how much can be achieved with the right training. Unfortunately, right now, only the most promising talent in a field receives the best training. If we can automate that, it would be much easier to become an expert in many fields.

So, if you don't want to decide, you could also improve the infrastructure for becoming an expert.

Do you know the story of the donkey in the middle between a bucket of water and a pile of hay? https://sive.rs/donkey

So the answer is: one at a time

If you can't decide, say, if all subjects are the same level of interest to you, pick one at random and spend 5 years on it. See where that gets you. If you are satisfied or bored, pick the next subject.

I had this feeling during my 20s, but now in my 30s I just relax and live my life without such thought. I have kids that add value to my life and I work as SRE on k8s clusters. Just relax and do whatever you want to do, even if you just do it for a few days, weeks or months, you gain experience that can be useful for all sorts of things. No need to become an absolute super nerd in just one tiny topic.

Obvious solution: become an expert in life extension.

I feel like the more things I learn, the faster I get at learning new things, and so the number of things I am able to get good at increases at a superlinear rate.

So, I don't think it's really an either get good at A or get good at B. It feels more like either get good at A and B, or neither.

This is my thesis, anyhow, for how polymaths emerge.

Extending life. Subjects to looks at:

https://www.sens.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics

Of course, even with a long enough life span you run into issues of brain capacity, but that is another discussion.

Wait 10-40 years for more progress with AI and brain-computer-interfaces.

The good news is that it will likely be completely possible to effectively be an expert in all of those things. The bad news is that everyone else will be an expert also.

It will probably be kind of like what has happened now with Google and arguments over trivia. Just 10 or 100 times more integrated and in-depth.

Still everything, but, faster! I just applied to YC with a learning accelerator that integrates many subjects into an optimized learning plan. The MVP should become useful in the next 6 months.

https://www.linkedin.com/company/conceptionary/

The premise that one must be an expert in a singular field is interesting, as I have found being a jack of many can be just as useful. No less, it can be tough separating the WANT to be an expert, versus the NEED to.

I can assure you you're not alone, our brains are just wired a certain way. There's silver lining in all things, if you try to dig a bit.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/863

Honestly I would drop the ego that fuels this mindset and make an inventory of the topics you've actually pursued in life so far. That can be a good indication of the things you truly find valuable, and it can lead to uncomfortable realizations.

I am an expert in procrastination and I intend to grow myself to become the absolute best procrastinator in the world! I am not just an expert, but will be a world leading expert.

I have 262,980 hours in actively practicing procrastination in my lifetime (30 solid years of procrastinating)

This is my life goal and I am doing very well in my progress at the moment.

It may have already been posted here, but my personal approach is to just try everything! But treat it like play, not work.

You filter through your interests WAY quicker with a first pass and then you can return to topics you felt were interesting and recursively apply this strategy, until a prioritisation seems obvious to you.

Don't worry, life will sort it out. Eventually you will realize that you cannot even be an expert of a niche field.

Somehow I don't think that time is the bottleneck here... The problem is that as you become an expert in a new area, you soon cease to be an expert in the old area. It's difficult to stay up to date and also to keep your skills fresh. If you don't practice a skill for a long time, it tends to decline.

One thing to realize is that the most relevant skills and knowledge are changing rapidly. So maybe it's better to be an expert in adapting to and adopting new approaches.

Because being an expert in less practical subjects that are slightly dated can still be useful and interesting but may tend a little more towards vanity.

To quote my favourite poet, Tomas Transtromer, from his poem "The Blue House"

------

"Thank you for this life! Still, I miss the alternatives. The sketches, all of them, want to become real."

"Without really knowing it, we divine. Our life has a sister ship, following quite a different route".

Prioritize. Pick one thing and start there.

I'd also ask yourself "Why do I want to be an expert specifcially?" Is this really just a manifestation of narcissism? Are you really after admiration and respect? Work on yourself. That's the best advice I can give you.

Take up super learning, increase speed of input. I can take in youtube videos and podcasts at 2x to 5x depending on the speaker.

Don't waste your time on things which aren't persistent or foundational. Example: learn physics before fashion.

Marketing and public relations. Raise as much money for anti-aging research as possible.

This book helped me A LOT.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/287818.Refuse_to_Choose_

If you want to master many things, you must first master one. Pick a personal or professional interest and start learning. Do it now and don't waste time choosing, for the choice will ultimately not matter.

"I know that I know nothing" - Socrates

“The wise man is one who, knows, what he does not know.” ― Lao Tzu

This is not to say "give up". But it is saying that you need to "give up" the idea and you will find peace.

I think about what forms of expertise will be meaningful when I am dying.

I follow needs and desires... For needs well, priority is needed... For desires since I have no specific time goal I can follow momentary willingness, stop and restart as much as I like.

I'm planning to live for 1000 years.

Never been very good at planning, tho.

Once can be an expert in things that are complete crap, or that are of no consequence, or both. Have some personal way of identifying those topics and shun them.

Whatever you decide on, don't "fake it 'til you make it", even if that has proved to be a working strategy in certain countries and cultures.

You do something and see whether it sticks. If it does, you continue; if it doesn't you switch. Then later on you might come back to the previous thing.

Wanting something is easy, doing is hard. Get past wanting to doing and it will automatically filter to a manageable set of goals.

Life isn’t enough for anything, I want to spend decades on so many interesting things but all I can assign to them are weekends.

This is something I've been looking into to. What do I specialize in? How do I become an expert at something?

Don't worry, it will be enough in 50 years. Btw, for now, just concentrate your most like topics and GO!

You should work on life extension. If you succeed, you'll have more time to work on other things.

Of the many things, can you rank them?

Maior pars mortalium, Pauline, ...

The first thing you should focus on working on is longevity / life extension research.

Draw a dependency tree of your interests. Then focus on the root.

First step after finding inspiration was to stop doing wage labor

Believe in a religion that postulates an infinite life after the current one. If you're right, big win: you're going to have all the time you want; of not, by the time you know you don't care any more.

Be an expert in happiness. It's very rewarding.

"Be so good they can't ignore you."

choose one, commit and be expert on that

the benefit of not commited to one is you could be anything, problem is you are nothing.

You can use money and fun to judge.

I struggle with this too, as I have many hundreds of inventions scattered across my notes that I'll never get to make. The interesting thing is that many of them have manifested through the work of others over the last 20-30 years, although some are so fringe that I don't expect them to come into being without effort on my part.

The thought of never being able to make what's in my heart sent me to a dark place a few years ago and coincided with a profound burnout and breakdown in my physical health just before the pandemic.

As I've healed, I've come to believe in reincarnation. Not some woo woo metaphysical thing that can never be proven (it can't), but more like, having chapters or past lives within lives, usually transitioned through major life events and trauma. As in, my daily lived experience and worldview no longer align with the ones I had growing up, going off to school, entering my career, losing friends and family along the way, etc. This is maybe my 7th chapter?

Not only that, but we experience being ourselves in different lives when we dream. It's not a stretch for me to imagine waking up tomorrow in someone else's life, with no memory of my own. Which brings me peace, as it takes some of the pressure off of performing in my own life if my lived experience is just as sacred with the same dignity as everyone else's.

Where this matters is how I think about success and failure. Imagine if every risk we take is a coin flip that determines the next chapter of our lives in our next reality. Heads: we succeed and build upon that success. Tails: we fail and find ourselves deeper in the hole we've dug for ourselves.

Most of my heroes are successful people like Steve Wozniak and John Carmack. They enjoyed early success and found backing by benefactors who helped them stay on course and make the contributions in their hearts.

But I also feel a kinship with failures like Vincent van Gogh and Oscar Wilde. They worked in relative obscurity, never feeling like they accomplished what they wanted to do, all the way until the day they died.

My own life feels like a series of say 10 coin flips that all came up tails. In some ways I'm in the most wretched reality, the 1 of 1024 possible that most acutely exacerbates my suffering.

But that's not quite right, because my life is an equal balance of good and bad, in which serendipity gave me the most amazing experiences and opportunities. Almost like the universe was listening and went out of its way to lay the path for me to travel. I just didn't notice, because I was so wrapped up in external measures of success that I forgot that the important part is being alive and conscious to experience it all.

Now I have a pragmatic view of success and failure. I'm happy when people make it. But that's their experience, their life, their reality. What it really comes down to is, what to do with the time that is given to us, quoting Gandalf.

I think of reality now like a video game where we popped in a quarter to get an extra life. We do our best, we make our mark, then we find ourselves doing it all over again. I try to help people who have that fire in their belly to make the world a better place. But I'm concerned about people who haven't woken up to these sorts of ideas, who chase extreme wealth and power, in the end hurting an aspect of themselves in another life.

At the end of the day, my mantra is whatever it takes. I do whatever I can from moment to moment to shift into the reality I wish to exist in, through mindfulness meditation and daily practice to form habits which get me closer to my goals. As I've become more aware of concepts like co-creation, I've found that life opens up with new possibilities I hadn't conceived of, which has helped me find meaning and reaffirmed my belief in free will and freedom itself.

Practically, that means that I take care of my body's health, I go to work, but I define my own boundaries now. I take time for my own projects regardless of consequence, confident in my ability to handle what creation throws at me. I don't let others' lived experience overshadow my own anymore. I've gotten to experience the feeling of success lately, physically/mentally/spiritually, and it feels wonderful after so many years of struggling.

Basically, choose the one thing most dear to your heart, and go do that.

But these are my views through my filter. Please take them as leads, not conclusions. Apologies that this got so long again, but hey, it's Sunday.

Maybe…

…your ability to appreciate one pursuit or subject will be forever impaired by the existential urgency to “catch ‘em all”.

I realized long ago that I’m addicted to novelty. And I’ve accepted that and I’m okay with it - I love ideas and starting things high on the inspiration and vision for the future, only to lose steam and switch to something else (lack of higher purpose and discipline).

For me, I think it’s all about a drive for significance. So I do a lot cuz I want to matter and be important, make an impact, dent the universe, etc. I don’t want to be an expert in terms of knowledge, but instead in execution and realizing the initial vision. To decide what to go with right now, I’ve come up with the following priority scheme:

0) things where I have passion, highest excitement, engagement, you will not be the best or be an expert if this is not true - non-negotiable step 0 1) youth and time advantage - things that need me you look younger or be unrestricted by family, mortage, energy 2) risk appetite/tolerance advantage - which things are higher risk that I can surely accept now but maybe not in the future when I have more responsibility 3) unlocking other freedoms or opportunities - which things will unlock everything else and make them effortless to start - like exiting a startup with major $$ so you can put it all into ungodly expensive hobbies like becoming an expert rally car racer. I can’t do that financially right now :( 4) what will help myself and my family, friends, tribe in a meaningful way 5) what will help the world in a meaningful way, end suffering 6) discover new truths and scientific knowledge for the benefit of humanity.

It’s essentially a tie-breaking algorithm , shameless hacker plug ;).

I’ll close with a few quotes/ideas:

- with the strategy above you need to set a clear, achievable short term goal with explicit success criteria so you can be honest with yourself if discipline wavers and want to switch to something else. Trace it to the root cause!

- you should go all-in on it. prioritize, but make it short term so you can course correct, do a personal check-in on how it’s going. Give it at least a week, never more than 90 days. Bite sized goals are better because you can have a tighter iteration on your process and see if you’re happy.

- C’s make CEOS because they are smart enough to execute but dumb enough to not doubt themselves, enumerate the ways for failure, be distracted by exciting new ideas, etc.

- people saying “life is short” made me anxious and stressed for a while, and one day my girlfriend said “relax, life is actually pretty long”. I’m having a better time thinking like that.

- the most important part of life is other people. I heard some obscure YouTuber say that about 4 years ago, and I thought it had to be more complex than that. I’m increasingly believing he’s right.

I can appreciate how you feel because, I, along with many others here (as illustrated by the responses to this post) feel the same way.

What has been particularity important for me in dealing with this is to not let this desire to be versed in a wide array of subjects lend itself to a state of thrashing. It is my goal to possess a range of knowledge, but I know that it will not be perfectly all encompassing, but good or some is better than none.

When I say thrashing I am referring to precisely the same sort of thrashing which computers might endure, process thrashing, wherein "when the process working set cannot be coscheduled – so not all interacting processes are scheduled to run at the same time – they experience 'process thrashing' due to being repeatedly scheduled and unscheduled, progressing only slowly."[0] I was first introduced to this idea and it's application to human life through the book Algorithms to Live By, by Brian Christian and Thomas L. Griffiths and I try to keep it in mind.

I couple this idea with some advice from Donald Knuth which he extols in the form of an anecdote about his mother (shared by Shuvomoy Das Gupta): "My mother is amazing to watch because she doesn't do anything efficiently, really: She puts about three times as much energy as necessary into everything she does. But she never spends any time wondering what to do next or how to optimize anything; she just keeps working. Her strategy, slightly simplified, is, "See something that needs to be done and do it." All day long. And at the end of the day, she's accomplished a huge amount."

This second bit of advice is useful because it reminds me not to get hung up on optimization or identifying the best possible learning pathway. When you aspire to learn many different things, there's nearly an infinite number of places you can get stuck, you can get so stuck in fact, that you fail to learn very much at all.

The last bit of advice is a general one: pick the subjects which are most fundamental. For example, say I would like to learn about Zoology, Botany, and Marine Biology. It is most advantageous to choose to study Biology first, as it underpins the three. Then, down the line, should I take the time to dig into each subject in particular, my rate of learning will be accelerated. This isn't anything special, and is in fact the basis of most modern STEM education, learn the fundamentals (math, physics, chemistry, biology) etc. and then the later in-depth topics are built upon that foundation.

So, to summarize:

Pick a subject (the more fundamental the better), think (a little bit, but not too much) about how you will approach learning it, and simply begin. If something else comes along and piques your interest, feel free to switch gears and follow that interest, but be sure to avoid thrashing, hopping from subject to subject or task to task so rapidly that you aren't picking up anything at all. Just as the other commenters here said, you will be amazed at just how much knowledge you accumulate over time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrashing_(computer_science)#:...

[1] https://shuvomoy.github.io/blogs/posts/Knuth-on-work-habits-....

Passion

Grace

Embrace the concept of a talent stack. List the things you love and/or are talented in. Enumerate subsets of this list to find things which combine as many of these things as possible.

This maximizes the amount of what you love that you get to do, and it puts you in a niche where you are uniquely well suited.

You can't be an expert in many things.

Be an expert in one thing + know a little of more other things