"You'll Use Everything You Ever Learned"
Over the past year I've thought and read a lot about the topic of mastery. Generally, the idea is that to be amongst the best in the world in a particular field, you'll need to spend 10,000 or more hours deliberately practising your chosen craft.
I've been a big believer in this approach. Practically speaking, I've seen the returns in my own life using this approach in playing piano, long-distance running and writing radio shows.
The proponents of mastery view the inverse of a specialist to be a mediocre generalist; a jack of all trades but a master of none. However when evaluating two opposing views, the truth often lies somewhere in the middle. Counter examples of very successful generalists include Benjamin Franklin, Elon Musk, Leonardo DaVinci, and Charlie Munger.
This is where the title of the post comes in. As described in Steve Martin's book "Born Standing Up", during a commercial break on the Tonight Show, Johnny Carson leaned over and told him:
"You'll use everything you ever learned"
And Steve said Johnny was right. For example, as a teenager he worked at Disneyland and performed rope tricks to sell lassos to tourists. He would later use those rope tricks in the movie ¡Three Amigos!. A similar example is Steve Jobs sitting in on calligraphy classes in college, which he incorporated into the beautiful typography on early Apple computers. As Jobs said:
"The key is in connecting the dots."
You never know which dots are going to be useful. I suppose a lot of them won't be. But statistically, if you don't create some dots, you've got a low chance of having two good ones to connect. Going back to the truth lying somewhere in the middle of Mastery and Generalists, my current thinking is that you've got to specialize in a field, but in order to bring new, creative or innovative ideas to it, you'll need to be able to draw on some dots that lie outside of it.
I know in my own life I've got some weird dots; my resume includes stops in the adult diaper business, late night radio and selling lanyards. I'm not sure where the next stop will be, but I'm sure those dots will connect somewhere.
What interesting dots have you connected in your life?
If you're interested in the topic of Mastery or the Specialist vs Generalist debate, here are some additional resources:
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