

Fear of Everything Else - bootload
http://dyske.com/?view_id=916

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skolor
Its an interesting read, but I disagree with many of the points:

 _In the West, specialization is encouraged at early ages._ While it seems to
be mostly anecdotal, I tend to think the opposite, that this happens more in
Asian countries than in the West. Yes, children are applauded for "knowing
what they want to do", but they frequently change that, and the reason for
applause isn't knowing "what they want to do" its knowing early enough to make
sure that it is an attainable goal. His examples are both professions that
require decades of experience/practice/training to be particularly good at,
and starting young is the only way to achieve that in a reasonable time frame.

 _When we raise children with this bias towards specialization, they become
defenseless when they enter the real world._ Again, this is just anecdotal,
but the children I've seen who have the most problems coping are those who
were raised to be generalists. These were children who had a severe fear of
not accomplishing something, they could not cope with not doing well. When a
problem arose, they had to find a solution, no matter how out of their area of
knowledge it was. While, to some degree this is a good thing (in fact, I would
guess that this is a large driving force behind most of the people on this
site), these were people who were true "generalists". Instead of falling back
on a specialty of theirs, they had to do it in the way presented, and
eventually would fail and be destroyed by it. While these are mainly the
"advanced" students from high school finding college particularly difficult,
it is little different than (say) a Python Hacker who decides that a problem
must be solved with Haskell, and simply will not put it down until it is. They
would keep trying, and since they didn't have that specialty (ie, Python) to
fall back on to create a frame to understand the problem, they had no way of
understanding it at all.

~~~
mattm
FYI, I believe the author was born in and grew up in Japan and has now lived
in the US for many years. Some of his other essays point out differences
between Japanese culture and American culture.

I agree with you though. I have lived in China and found possibly more
specialization there as parents usually set the course for their children
which most children feel obligated to follow. Whereas in the "West" parents
generally leave things open to their children to decide.

When I first read the article, I found this part the most interesting:

"I remember reading about how good The Rolling Stones were in self-promotion.
Someone in the article said that nobody becomes that successful by sheer luck.
I tend to agree.... When we raise children with this bias towards
specialization, they become defenseless when they enter the real world. They
naively and faithfully keep improving their skills in their own specialized
areas thinking that the success will automatically follow."

Jeff Atwood had an article where he mentioned that if he could train every
developer on some skill it wouldn't be technical as most decent developers are
already good with technical things. He would train them how to market and
promote themselves since most developers just focus on programming and ignore
the other skills needed to become successful.

~~~
skolor
Personally, I believe three things are necessary for success:

* A specialization. Without specializing in something, you will never be the best/at the top of your field. You need something to be good at, something to be better than everyone else at.

* Something else. I think the best thing that ever happened to me was pursuing a degree in Statistics in college (as opposed to Computer Science, which I started in). I ended up in it a rather un-panned method, and it has influenced me far more than anything else I have done. Given the chance, I would recommend any person, particularly those who want to get into start-ups, to go get a degree, but in something that interests them, not in something they think will be useful.

* Equal parts Confidence, Stubbornness, and Genius, with a dash of Charisma. Without that, you can have the best idea in the world, but never make it, or be able to sell it.

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kiba
Interesting.

I also found that I am really good at one thing, but I also dabble in pretty
much everything else, whether that is finance, economics, drawing, and
electronic hacking.

I acquired a little bit of knowledge in each field but nothing really match my
programming knowledge and experience.

