The Super Freak has spoken.
Discussion
They're the ones that typically have a fixed mindset.
They expect everything to be easy for them. If they're not excelling they give up & move on to something they can excel at. That's a stupid game/instrument/thing they'll say & move on.
This was basically me at pretty much any academic endeavour when I was young. I barely studied through high school but still got great grades.
It took me a long time to realise the trap I had made for myself with my attitude & perspective. I was a freak in my small home town but nothing special in the big city university.
I learned to persist if I really wanted something. If I didn't want something, I'd ask if I actually didn't want it or if I was just walking away out of fear of failing or the effort required to master it.
This was interesting to ponder.
On one hand, we shouldn't withdraw from opportunities to reinforce points of weakness. Focusing only on strengths to the exclusion of strengthening weaknesses is a risky play. One might not get burned by one's weaknesses. One might be able to leverage the economy to convert value earned from strengths into value paid for coverage of areas of weakness. It mostly depends on how the value streams balance. If the income stream is high and the expenditure stream is low, this strategy can pay off. Often times the people in the wealthier echelons of society are elite at one, maybe two things.
This, however, creates problems. When someone is amazing at one thing and garbage at everything else, that person is "top heavy". They're not well rounded. They're dependent upon numerous people who they must pay in order to enable them to focus exclusively on their forte. This creates the need for trusted third party authorities or, at the very least, it creates the need to solicit bids from multiple vendors to compare/contrast bid details and pricing.
I'm prone to think that the sweet spot Goldilocks zone entails the Pareto principle. Let's say that I can learn/acquire 80% of a subject in 1 month, but it will take me 4 months to acquire the other 20%. It would be 4x better for me to learn 80% of 5 different subjects across 5 months (80% x 5 = 400%) than it would be for me to spend 5 months learning 100% of 1 subject.
I think it's worth it to pursue the final 20% on a few subjects, but perhaps that's best done on an 'as needed' basis.
Tried to zap you just now. Not sure if it will work. Zaps are so frustrating. I'm making progress on reworking my NOSTR setup. First step was getting my node and lightning node better set up. Still got a little bit of work to do there but progress has been made. NOSTR wallets and nsec management are next on my list.
We used to joke that those people were a jack of all trades & master of none.
Carol Dwek wrote a book on Mindset about 20 years ago & I found it useful at the time. She proposed that people tended to have either a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. Later many corporations picked it up & pushed out a rather crude summary of it but few actually read the book. They basically inferred that a growth mindset was good & that people with a fixed mindset needed corporate reprogramming. Cringe
Essentially the growth mindset people believed that they could do anything with some effort & persistence. Fixed mindset people believed that they could either do something or they couldn't. The fixed mindset people typically had that belief because they were naturally good or bad at almost anything they attempted. It says a lot about the power of your belief IMO. It also neglects the fact that some people just don't have the capacity to perform certain tasks no matter how hard or long they work at it. I've seen many such cases.
I shifted my mindset as a result of reading the book but I also knew that I don't really want to do everything & I don't want to do anything forever. I started applying a cost benefit calculation to the things I threw myself into. Yes I could do it, but is it worth the effort required to master & how quickly would that skill be depreciated? I cut short my career in software development after 6 months even though I had the degree. The juice just wasn't worth the squeeze, it wasn't for me.
You should always play to your strengths but also be aware of your weaknesses.
Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers also heavily affected my opinion on it too.
It's where the 10,000 hrs principle came from. You can be an outlier in any field as long as you have the capacity & perform the work/activity for 10,000 hrs.
I remember a pop song being written about it.
Gladwell can be so insightful. We used to talk about chapter 8 from Outliers at the learning center where I taught math and critical thinking. For example, we noticed that addition problems involving 7 tended to be a problem for students whose dominant learning sense was auditory. The auditory learners doing 7+5 would often give an answer of 13. Because they encoded information best via their ears, the fact that se-ven has two syllables created a “bubble” of uncertainty around 7 in their minds. If they spoke Mandarin where all of the single digit numbers are 1 syllable each, that issue would not have existed.
I'm still waiting for the tipping point to play out regarding Bitcoin.
🤣