If you have multiple interests, do not waste the next 2-3 years

Society made you think that having multiple interests was a weakness. Go to school. Get a degree. Get a job. Retire at some point. But there is so much wrong with that sequence of events. We don’t live in the Industrial Age anymore. Specializing in one skill is almost certain death. I feel like we all know by this point how dangerous mechanical living and siloed learning is for your psyche and soul. And people can feel that we’re going through a second renaissance. Your curiosity and love for learning are your advantage in today’s world, but there is something missing. For the longest time, I learned and learned and learned. I was stuck in tutorial hell. Some may call it shiny object syndrome to point out your lack of focus. I got my dopamine from feeling smart, but my life didn’t change all that much. Honestly, I felt like I was just falling behind. I tried so many different things in college. I had dreams of doing my own thing... earning an income from something creative... but after spending 5 years “learning,” I was met with the reality that I had to get the best job I could find just so I could survive. The missing piece was a vessel. A vessel that would allow me to channel all of my interests into meaningful work that I could earn a decent income from. If you’ve ever felt guilty for not being able to pick one thing, if you’ve been told to niche down when your mind wants to expand, if you’ve wondered whether there’s a path you can take that doesn’t lead to the misery you see in everyone else’s eyes – this is the greatest time to be alive. Here are 7 of the most compelling ideas I could come up with. We’ll start by understanding why having multiple interests is a superpower in today's world, then I’ll give you practical steps to turn that into your life’s work. We have a lot to talk about, so I hope you’re here for the ride. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations... generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. — Adam Smith Funny you say that Mr. Smith, because you created those people, and we’re still dealing with the backlash. Specialization took over during industrialization because, in a pin factory, for example, one worker doing every step could make 20 pins a day. Then workers, each doing one step, could make 48,000. So we built an entire world around this model. Humans became assembly lines working 9 to 5 because frankly, governments don’t serve the national interest, they serve their own interest. Corporations don’t serve the employees interest, they serve their own. Schools were designed to serve that interest. Their sole purpose was to create factory workers who were punctual and obedient. But this is no way to live. If you want to have specialized knowledge so that you could never run an operation, especially your own operation, then be dependent on schools for your education and jobs for your wage. Be duped into believing the promise that specialization is what makes a human valuable when it is clear that the system does not need you, specifically, to perform that task. In lies the distinction. If pure specialization makes people stupid and dependent, what makes an individual smart and sovereign? Three ingredients: Self-education, self-interest, self-sufficiency. Self-education is clear, because if you want to achieve a result different from that of traditional education, you must direct your own learning. Self-interest raises some flags. It sounds selfish and short-sighted, which many people view as bad without thinking through it, but it simply means “concern with one’s own interest,” because the only other option is to serve the interest of the organizations that compose society as it is, which we’ve discussed. In other words, follow your interest, because your interest can very well benefit others in a selfless way - depending on your level of cognitive and moral development. Oh, and by the way, indulging in short-lived pleasures (cheap dopamine) is usually not your interest, but the interest of corporations that benefit from your mindlessness. The truly selfish person, in Ayn Rand’s view, is a self-respecting, self-supporting human being who neither sacrifices others to himself nor sacrifices himself to others. This rejects both the predator and the doormat. Self-sufficiency is the refusal to outsource your judgment, learning, and agency. If self-education is the engine and self-interest is the compass, self-sufficiency is the foundation that prevents your life direction from being hijacked by another force. They collaborate, but are not fully dependent. The generalist emerges naturally from this triad. Self-interest motivates self-education. You learn because it genuinely serves your flourishing, not because someone assigned it. Self-education enables self-sufficiency. You can only be sovereign over domains you understand. Self-sufficiency clarifies self-interest. When you’re not dependent on others’ interpretations, you can actually perceive what serves you. Most people pursue multiple interests as an escape from their work. When your interests become your work, or your life’s work, most of them start to filter out. When we look at every CEO, founder, or creative that we actually admire, they are generalists. They understand enough about marketing to direct it, enough about product to build it, and enough about people to lead them. But they also need to direct the ship. They need to learn and adapt when circumstances change. More importantly, they understand that ideas across domains complement each other and create a unique way of viewing the world, which allows them to catch novel ideas from the aether and translate them into market value. When we look at where the world is today, and if you understand the opportunities available to singular individuals, not just leaders, you will find that the options you have as a natural polymath are extensive. It should spark an immense amount of excitement in you. Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses—especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else. — Leonardo da Vinci The ultimate moat, or the final competitive edge worth paying for, in my opinion, is an opinion. A perspective that only you can see, because the uniqueness of your life experience created it. That may just be the last thing anyone else can replicate. And since that’s always been the case, why not prioritize that now? Especially when automation is at our doorstep? But how do you prioritize it? How do you develop it? By pursuing multiple interests and building something with them. You see, every interest you’ve ever pursued leaves behind a residue. Every interest increases the number of connections that can be made. Every interest expands and increases the complexity of how you model and interpret reality. The more complex your model of reality, the more problems you can solve, opportunities you can see, and value you can create. Specialism completely halts this process, and your shiny object syndrome has been trying to tell you this whole time. From birth until now, you are cultivating a way of seeing things that others can’t. A way of seeing things that AI can only think if you tell it what to think. A person who studied psychology and design sees user behavior differently from the pure designer. A person who learned sales and philosophy closes deals differently than the pure salesman. A person who understands fitness and business builds health companies that MBAs can’t comprehend. Your edge lies more in intersection than it does in expertise. This is the exact pattern we see in the Renaissance that is coming back with a much stronger force now. Consider what made it possible... Before the printing press, knowledge was scarce. Books were copied by hand. A single text could take a scribe months to reproduce. Libraries were rare. Literacy was rarer. If you wanted to learn somethi…