YouTube comments:

“As a former gifted kid, this explains so much about how I was taught.”

“My trajectory as a designer was to be very general for along time. This helped shape my overall skillset but when it came to actually delivering projects and building a business, I needed some aspect of specialisation. Perhaps specialising is the thing that sits at the front of a broad skillset?”

“Specialist are often strange people and limited thinkers. I became a chess champion at 7 for the first time, I turned away from it because of it’s limitations on thought. After a few years of defending my title I just couldn’t see the point anymore.”

“I think the ideal is to be a generalist, where you are go in depth for 2-3 domains… for example, I am an engineer and have background in operations management, but also try to learn a bit of everything (finance, IT, sales, etc)”

The traditional path to success has emphasized excelling in a single discipline or field rather than being a generalist. But writer David Epstein is challenging that wisdom, contending that it’s sometimes better to be a jack of all trades.

Author David Epstein: “I think most people have absorbed at least the gist of the Tiger Woods story. His father gave him a putter when he was six months old. He was physically precocious and dragged it around everywhere in his circular baby walker, started imitating a swing at 10 months. By 2 years old, he was on national TV showing off his swing in front of Bob Hope. By 3, his father started to media train him. Fast forward to 21, he’s the best golfer in the world. He’s very focused on golf — large amounts of deliberate practice where it’s like technical training.

Roger Federer, on the other hand, played a dozen different sports from skiing and skateboarding, rugby, badminton, basketball, soccer, all sorts of things. He delayed specializing. His mother was a tennis coach and refused to coach him because he wouldn’t return balls normally. When his coaches tried to kick him up a level, he declined because he just wanted to talk about pro wrestling with his friends.

When he first got good enough to warrant an interview from the local paper and they asked what would he buy with his first check if he ever became a pro, [they thought] he said a Mercedes. His mother was appalled and asked if she could hear the interview recording. She did, and Roger had actually said “mair CDs” in Swiss-German, which just means he wanted more CDs, not a Mercedes, so she was OK with that.

He kept playing badminton, basketball and soccer years after his peers were focusing only on tennis, and obviously he turned out OK. So, which one of these is the norm? If you look at the science instead of just individual stories, which is a norm?

It turns out it is the Roger pattern. All around the world, sports scientists track the development of athletes and found they have a so-called sampling period, where they gain these broad general skills to scaffold later learning. They learn about their interests. They learn about their abilities. They systematically delay specializing until later than their peers, who plateau at lower levels.”

The United States is seeing its highest “quit rate” since the government started keeping track two decades ago. Bill Whitaker speaks with employers who are scrambling to find help and people who left their jobs and aren’t looking back.

YouTube comments:

“I’ve worked in the food industry since I was 16, I am 30 now. I’ve never been offered a management position or any other kind of supervisory role so I opened my own restaurant in 2020. I got tired of being overlooked so I took my fellow co-workers and gave them a job at my restaurant with great pay, great benefits and I really did for them what my former jobs refused to do which is giving them “respect”. So far I’ve had not one employee leave my business.”

“Bad environment, low pay, employers are demanding more and paying less. I quit my job because I was expected to do the job of 3 people and constantly reprimanded for not being able to keep up. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has gone through this. A lot of businesses, corporations treat their employees like dirt, unimportant. They are way too many managers out there that have absolutely no people skills and are high on a power trip.”

“I’ve worked since I was 13. I walked the day I turned 55. It was always the plan. Nobody ever gave me a dime. I kept telling everyone at work I was going to leave. No one believed me. I left everything at my desk. Got up and left. I’m now 62. Just started S.S. All those years I worked my way up the ladder. When I got there I realized there was just more work. Get out early if you can.”

“Also let’s take some social responsbility for ourselves- it’s not JUST the companies that make jobs miserable. I talk to people in the service and retail industries and I personally spent years in IT. On the customer end, people are often entitled, impatient, and rude. It’s far worse that what I remember it 20 years ago. Don’t make your own workplace or that of someone else, needlessly toxic. Your Amazon package being a day late or waiting in line a little longer at the supermarket are not the end of the world. You will survive, I promise.”