Ask HN: Generalists, when do you say "I know enough" about any particular topic?

I’m not setting boundaries - and I think you will notice when to shift! When noone and no book seems to teach you anything new about a certain topic. When you read the latest book and think, „hmm yes, but i think they omitted a and b and c and in reality this isn’t so nicely separated and way more nuanced“. Then it is definitely time to shift your attention to a different topic. I’m doing this for decades now - and i think lots of others too. You will never learn all about everything. But it’s fun to try :-)

I learn about something when I need to know in order to do something I'm trying to do, or when I'm curious. The second one is kind of self-limiting - when I don't have time or energy, I'm less curious.

I don't feel that I "ought" to know. There's too much. I can't. So I learn what I need, and what I want.

Left behind? You have no choice. When you're learning A, you're not learning B through Z, except that there are a lot more than 26 options. You can't learn it all. There's simply not enough time.

The real question is, of the limited amount of time you have for learning, what's the most important/valuable thing for you to be learning now?

when you finish the task which originally drove you to learn about the topic

>The idea is generalists know a lot about everything and when to pass it off to a subject matter expert.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA

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

It's all about history repeating; or better yet understanding when it's something new and often forcing that.

They say 10,000 hours to become an expert, but that's brute forced learning. When you actually learn how to learn, what universities USED TO teach and have since stopped teaching, you can do it much quicker. People who know how to learn can become an expert in under 1000 hours.

>In 2025, with everything in tech changing by the minute, I’m realizing I need to set boundaries about how deep I go on any particular topic. But I’m unsure how. Particularly if I don’t want to get left behind as things continue to evolve.

that's the wrong way to approach it; or perhaps definition of depth? Depth to me is about a subject that cant be understood until certain other learning milestones have been learnt. Which is perhaps a depth, but also something you can force as something new. A new pattern that will as above be part of the learning.

It's fine to go deep, so long as you're seeing a new pattern you cant predict. The limit isnt about depth, it's about seeing something new.

You never know 'enough'. You just have broad interests and see how all things are more interlinked than any one specific branch of knowledge captures. So you naturally wander through a host of subjects rather than exclusively deepdive into a single specialization.