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I'm really interested in this. How do you deal with stopping doing something you're half way to getting good at (c.f. it takes 10 years to get good at anything

• jacquesm 17y ago
  I think it is more like learning languages than being a genius. It's hard work (make that very hard work) but as you get more basic knowledge it becomes easier to integrate stuff that you are learning. The only thing I would say I've ever truely 'mastered' is C programming, other than that I have lots of things where I can get by and learn from people that really know their stuff. It is inevitable that it works like a spotlight, you turn it on an area of interest and go all out to learn what you can about it, then as your return-on-investment in time drops off you can decide to continue or quit, usually I quit when I get to the level where I'd have to go 'full-time' in order to advance. There is just too much interesting stuff to do, no way to be an expert in more than one field. One of the most interesting things that I've found is that as you do this you keep running in to domain specific knowledge that can fairly easily be translated in to other domains that haven't picked up on that trick yet. This is a fairly good way to make a living. As for doing the turning things upside-down and learning at the same time, usually it coincides, but that is not a necessity. For me it is just a way to keep living fun.