#Learning is vital to society, just to forestall that quick slip-back into the darkness. By "learning", I mean both the formal and the informal varieties, but with a strong emphasis on self-guided, lifelong pursuit of knowledge to an adequate depth.
A common rule-of-thumb is that 10,000 hours, or 10 years, of sustained study and persistent practice are required for an ordinary person to become proficient in a substantive endeavour, art of science.
A typical career lasts about 50 years, often longer. Hence, it is not unreasonable to say that an ordinary, motivated person could—I say, "could"—become proficient in 5 different worthy pursuits. These specialisations may be orthogonal (neurosurgery and jazz). They may be intersecting (corporate law and tax law). They may be entangled (computability theory and complexity theory).
By all means, a practitioner must be competent in the primary area of specialisation; rules of professional ethics demand so. But, nowadays, most practitioners in many fields—especially those that are not regulated, licensed professions—tend to hyper-specialise, to the detriment of both their careers and their industry. Of late, in #IT, hyper-specialisation has reached pandemic proportions.
In general, hyper-specialists are not sua sponte lifelong learners. It must be extremely taxing upon the mind to just lift-and-coast, for 40 years straight.
Loads of folks talk about learning something new in retirement—as if!
amen zwa, esq.
npub1pj…fay94
2026-02-21 01:43:21 UTC
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2026-02-21 01:43:21 UTCEvent JSON
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