This book helped me A LOT.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/287818.Refuse_to_Choose_
Ask HN: I want to be an expert in many things but my lifetime won't be enough
201–210 of 222 posts
Re: Ask HN: I want to be an expert in many things but my lifetime won't be enough
#202It 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.
Re: Ask HN: I want to be an expert in many things but my lifetime won't be enough
#203If 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 nobo…
I want to tack on another personal thank you for this response. This is very helpful for myself.
Re: Ask HN: I want to be an expert in many things but my lifetime won't be enough
#204Perfection 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.
Re: Ask HN: I want to be an expert in many things but my lifetime won't be enough
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can appreciate that it might be like that for some, but absolutely not for me. Deeper mathematics is meaningful to me for its beauty and the way it feels like arriving at some fundamental truth, for whatever value that can exist. Similar for deeper physics, it's very appealing to me to try to understand the world on some fundamental level, as much as we're capable. And I find it very satisfying solving a good math…
If you were standing at the entrance of a grand amusement park, would you feel despair that you have to choose which ride to take or excitement at having options? If the park were fantastically more grand, so you have no hope of sampling every amusement, does this somehow change your response? Your emotional valence here is your choice, not something intrinsic to the setting. That is what those cognitive behavioral t…
I think I needed to hear this. Thanks.
Re: Ask HN: I want to be an expert in many things but my lifetime won't be enough
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then the pages of the books will become dusty and humid, for sure deteriorated. Let alone the other beings living in the house will also somehow interact with the books in other ways than the romantic fantasy setup you proposed.
What the heck are you even talking about? I gotta say, Hacker News is probably one of the least welcoming communities on the internet.
Try to leave a book open on the kitchen a couple of weeks, and another on the bathroom/shower. Then come back and post. And if you happen to not live alone, the same. IF the book is large enough/hard cover to remain open by the page you were reading.
Basically I am calling BS for what it is.
Re: Ask HN: I want to be an expert in many things but my lifetime won't be enough
#207Take 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.
Re: Ask HN: I want to be an expert in many things but my lifetime won't be enough
#208Take 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.
dubious that consuming more content will ease concerns about not being able to consume more content
people will find more personal engagement and happiness learning about what ever sparks their interest be it physics or fashion
Re: Ask HN: I want to be an expert in many things but my lifetime won't be enough
#209I'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.
Re: Ask HN: I want to be an expert in many things but my lifetime won't be enough
#210Take 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.
how do you play audios at higher speed without breaking tonality(dont know the right term for it, but audio get very high peech at high speeds) of the speaker?
only vlc work great at 2x speeds but its podcast handling capacity is not that great.
other players just let go at 1.18x ..