T_shaped day

Being a generalist doesn't mean you can't be great at certain things, that's what it means to have t-shaped skills.

I've kept myself from diving into rabbit holes for years because I thought it'd be time wasted on things I wouldn't need, but now I realize how wrong that is.

Immersing yourself into a topic for the sake of it is how you actually get experience, sitting on the sidelines and consuming condensed information from someone else will NOT give you the knowledge you desire to get from it.

I've actually come to the conclusion that I don't agree with the whole "learning from others' mistakes" idea. Like if you have someone as a mentor and they have a blueprint laid out for you to achieve a specific goal, go for it.

If they actually know what they're talking about you'll probably achieve your goal. But unless your goal was to achieve something and leave at that, it'd only take a few challenges to show how unexperienced you really are.

For instance let's say you want to learn a skill like woodworking just from the blueprint your mentor gave you, you'd be getting all the final information, all the conclusions without the skill to arrive to those conclusions yourself, which is more valuable than the knowledge of how to make a table.

Knowing how to decide which tools you'll use is more important than knowing which tools to use. It makes you a one-trick pony instead of being a problem solver.