There are other points in support of your counter argument too. Defining the boundaries of a “skill” is arbitrary. Are we comparing ourselves to professionals or laypeople, and what counts as a useful level of achievement?
This same objection comes up on this website every time this argument gets made. You can find it in some of johnswentworth’s posts. The motion of the argument is always from the “combinations of skills makes you world-class” → “the good ones are all taken,” not the other way around.
The central point, unstated here, is that we need to find ways of sparking our imagination to see how we can get beyond imitation and into innovation.
It’s hard to go from a combination of very general skills (cooking, tractor repair, math, stand up comedy, arctic exploration) to a concrete idea for a job, invention, or research project.
Instead, focusing on the most important, tractable ideas pushes people to gain new skills outside their specialty. Those who hyper-specialize limit themselves to projects that are tractable within their current skillset. Those who are willing to learn in an open-ended way to pursue the most interesting goals acquire targeted micro-skills outside their main discipline.
This suggests an association between having a variety of skills and significant, world-class achievement. But it’s not that achievement will consistently follow from arbitrary skill combinations, but rather that the remaining available achievements can only be unlocked by mastering previously unknown skill combinations.
There’s an unstated call to action here. If you’re choosing between a moderately interesting project that’s fully within your skillset, and a very interesting one that requires learning some far-afield skills, choose the latter.
The central point, unstated here, is that we need to find ways of sparking our imagination to see how we can get beyond imitation and into innovation.
My personal approach is to deliberately master a variety of orthogonal skills and wait for my unconscious to ask “Why doesn’t someone do x?” because good cross-disciplinary ideas are often obvious to specialists and invisible to everyone else.
If you’re a database expert, don’t build a chat app for teenagers (unless you’re also a teenager). Maybe it’s a good idea, but you can’t trust your judgment about that, so ignore it. There have to be other ideas that involve databases, and whose quality you can judge. Do you find it hard to come up with good ideas involving databases? That’s because your expertise raises your standards. Your ideas about chat apps are just as bad, but you’re giving yourself a Dunning-Kruger pass in that domain.
There are other points in support of your counter argument too. Defining the boundaries of a “skill” is arbitrary. Are we comparing ourselves to professionals or laypeople, and what counts as a useful level of achievement?
This same objection comes up on this website every time this argument gets made. You can find it in some of johnswentworth’s posts. The motion of the argument is always from the “combinations of skills makes you world-class” → “the good ones are all taken,” not the other way around.
The central point, unstated here, is that we need to find ways of sparking our imagination to see how we can get beyond imitation and into innovation.
It’s hard to go from a combination of very general skills (cooking, tractor repair, math, stand up comedy, arctic exploration) to a concrete idea for a job, invention, or research project.
Instead, focusing on the most important, tractable ideas pushes people to gain new skills outside their specialty. Those who hyper-specialize limit themselves to projects that are tractable within their current skillset. Those who are willing to learn in an open-ended way to pursue the most interesting goals acquire targeted micro-skills outside their main discipline.
This suggests an association between having a variety of skills and significant, world-class achievement. But it’s not that achievement will consistently follow from arbitrary skill combinations, but rather that the remaining available achievements can only be unlocked by mastering previously unknown skill combinations.
There’s an unstated call to action here. If you’re choosing between a moderately interesting project that’s fully within your skillset, and a very interesting one that requires learning some far-afield skills, choose the latter.
My personal approach is to deliberately master a variety of orthogonal skills and wait for my unconscious to ask “Why doesn’t someone do x?” because good cross-disciplinary ideas are often obvious to specialists and invisible to everyone else.