Part of the problem is that each field is getting deeper and deeper so there’s more to learn.

I wonder why anyone would want to do more than one thing seeing the pain it is. Also, you must realize that since you can only think of one thing at a time, it makes no real difference how many things you know how to do because you are only doing that one thing right now. Make a lot of money doing that one thing and pay specialists in other areas to do all the other things for you such as cook and raise your children.

I have not lived up to this by any stretch of the imagination. I know lots of things about lots of things, but not enough to be really good at anything. Knowing only one thing is boring. Also, specialization can be taken to a silly extreme. Many of us want to spend time with children, to cook, to make art, and to learn about history. For each task there is a good reason to be good at it, and other tasks don’t really substitute well. We can’t all afford live-in cooks. We like to cook, but only for part of the day.

We’ll never make a living learning about the history of Syria because we are not that interested to go to history school, but damned it sure is interesting to read before we go to sleep. And some fields such as nursing mean you have to be good at more than one thing just to do one job.

The best part, of course is where the fields we like overlap. I write software to keep track of my story submissions, for example. I think it can be really neurotic to suppress curiosity for the whole world just to be an expert in such a tiny part of a field that nobody ever heard of. Most creative people I know—and these are in science as well as the arts—are interested in more than one field. Finally, we have to ask ourselves why do we live, I think in part it is to be free and happy. What kind of freedom is found in chaining ourselves to a field that was picked for us when we were in high school?

Ah, shucks, I’m just a dilettante.

But I think I prefer to think in terms of depth and breadth, rather than in terms of generalist and specialist. Because the latter seems limiting: you have to choose.

And it’s entirely possible that part of my resistance to that is that when I choose, I come down way hard on the generalist side of things. I am not great at _anything._ I am capable-to-good at all sorts of things.

But I don’t think that being a generalist has to mean spreading yourself too thin. Depth and breadth. Because I would take this:

“Here’s the paradox though–the more single-minded I’ve been about my writing, the more I’ve been interested in its connections to other disciplines.”

a step further, and say that intense pursuit of any one thing can, if you go about it in the right way, become the pursuit of everything.