A jack of all trades, but master of none...
Is often times better than a master of one :)
You are smart! You just probably have ADHD. I used to feel the same way, but I eventually realized that I really don’t think like others. My approximate knowledge is limited, but I can still leverage it to actually have advantages compared to others.
Oh I should get better at lying
Eh. Most people don’t even have this. It’s great to be a specialist, but a well rounded generalist is valuable as well. Some of the most creative people are are dilatantes as they are able to synthesize new things by combining knowledge of disparate categories. Staying curious and having a sense of purpose will give you an edge 90% of people don’t have in adulthood.
Staying curious and having a sense of purpose will give you an edge 90% of people don’t have in adulthood.
That’s a little ‘thanks I’m cured’ …
The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.
I know that I don’t know.
ooh i can actually speak to this! yes i know lots of nothing, but that nothing builds like a snowball, and then one day you wake up and are in your mid 30s and all those things you know are now expertises and people start to rely on you for that.
trust the process, you will keep learning more as time goes on and you will be able to put that to use. just not in your 20s. your 20s is where your dreams go to die temporarily
That’s actually really inspiring
Or you can do what I do: skip past the surface level stuff and find out what the experienced folks have to say about the abstract philosophical essence of the thing.
People will be amazed at the depth of your knowledge!
Almost as amazed as they’ll be when you can’t answer any of the most obvious practical questions immediately after.
I feel that so hard.
A while back, I was talking to a young electrical engineering student about how DACs do not produce the stairstep pattern that many textbooks and audiophile forums would lead you to believe. As the video in the link shows, you can create a sine wave with analog equipment, measure it on an analog oscilloscope, put it through a computer for ADC and then DAC, and measure the output on another analog oscilloscope. The sine wave you get on the output will be exactly the same as the input, excepting whatever line noise is introduced in the process. No stairstep at all.
In fact, if the stairstep were true, then square waves should come out perfect, not sine waves. It’s just the opposite; square waves come out as a messy combination of sine waves. This is generally fine, as square waves don’t really exist in nature, anyway.
Then the followup question came: DACs are built with a combination of voltage dividers (also known as a resistor ladder), which should produce just such a stairstep pattern. Why wouldn’t it be a stairstep?
I couldn’t remember what the hell the answer to that was at the moment, and probably came off like an idiot. The answer is that there’s a low pass filter that takes care of that, but I’ll be damned if I remembered that at the time.
I feel that so hard. I don’t know anything about the math involving quantum mechanics but once you whip out the philosophical side of it its my time to shine.
Careful. Tons of grifters and magical thinkers claim that their pseudoscientific nonsense is backed by quantum mechanics for that very reason (hardly anybody on the planet understands it). It’s not.
So when someone says, “the philosophical side” when referring to quantum mechanics, forgive me if my woo-radar goes off…
That’s understandable. The difference is, that most of the people who say that some stuff is backed by quantum physics don’t even know the basics.
I had a huge realization a few days ago and it unlocked a lot mentally for me.
It’s okay to not be a master of anything, because by becoming a master you sacrifice your broadness of knowledge. Keep being yourself, enjoy learning new stuff. Forcing myself into trying to be a master of something made me depressed and unhappy with my life.
You always hear about masters of a domain, but this branch is not fit to everyone and it’s okay. Capitalism and elitism makes it difficult to see that.
this is not a binary situation. you can be a master of one, two, or even more things and still have a broad base.
it’s also all relative and honestly just being happy with what you have, both in terms of material things as well as mental skills/knowledge is a good thing. doesn’t mean you stop learning or earning but you don’t have to be disappointed if you don’t get x amount of dollars or a y number of square feet in your house or z number of factoids in your trivia database
Jack of All Trades are useful and needed. Cross discipline interaction is where innovations and fun new ideas happen.
So much love for my neurodivergent homies. AuDHD me has an approximate knowledge of things I can’t control. Can I quote the majority of Shrek 2? Ofc. Did I make any effort to do so? No
damn bro, you didn’t have to call out me like that
Bro stop targeting me. This hits wayyy to close to home
Hey stop sharing my life story
Exceptional people seldom know they are exceptional… I think it may be the reason the world suffers so.
That’s pretty valuable. You’re truly smart because:
- you retained valuable information
- you acquired this information instead of spending your time on something else.
yet another meme that I found that makes me realize that I’m not alone in this (I rolled low on intelligence but high on wisdom when I was born)
I’m in this photo and I don’t like it
