There's a certain disconnect in that the author seems to require and at least want validation in terms of business success while selling himself as a 'true arti

There's a certain disconnect in that the author seems to require and at least want validation in terms of business success while selling himself as a 'true artist' interested only in making things. Here's something unintuitive for engineers about successful entrepreneurs, they're usually not very curious. Seeing the world in black and white rather than in color creates tunnel vision and focus. However many engineers in the bay area don't see themselves as engineers in the traditional sense of the word but some new combination of hacker-artist-technologist-elite. It's unintuitive because many bay-area engineer feel undervalued and that this mythos is bolstered by the success of people they actively look down on. So many engineers think that they are special snowflakes via: "I'm so smart and curious, I get bored so easily b/c I learn so fast. I need to constantly be learning and creating." They fall into the trap of valuing breadth over depth (as depth has diminishing returns to time-spent) that they ironically never become an expert in anything to a point where their expertise is truly unique. It takes a certain amount of focus and thus lack of curiosity to practice one kick a millions times vs a million different kicks. The expertise often comes at the cost of an uninteresting and single-direction life. Wether this is better or worse than sampling all the pre-packaged things (things like TED talks are the hedonistic equivalent of sex/drugs/food) that life has to offer is up to the individual. In the Bay, the jack-of-all-trades think of themselves as master-of-all-trades while following to the letter online-recipes for success and wondering why they aren't a michelin start restaurant. Specialization puts you in a sparse enough zone where your thoughts can actually be unique. * A curious life with specialization is possible though if the specialization is abstract enough. Specialization can also be built by following your true voice of curiosity rather than having it be influenced by social and monetary pressures. You can say that many youtuber for example followed their true voice, learning some video editing, learning to be humorous to make up for lack of academic success, and managed to be lucky b/c youtube was created. Most people stamp out their inner voice because 99% of the time, you'll end up specialization in something that can't create value that is directly linked to USD. Teaching is one example where the payoffs are so far down the road that they are inadequately compensated for what they do. (I'm ignoring the the majority of US teachers who are often losers on power trips)