FocusAndFanout

As people get along in years, the lucky ones keep growing and learning, "improving their minds". They tend to choose one of two paths:

• deeper --- concentrating on a speciality, mastering a single field ... turning into "the World's Foremost Authority" on a topic; or
• wider --- branching out from a base of expertise, generalizing fundamental concepts to new domains ... as when astronomers become cosmologists, or politicians become philosophers.

Not many have the luxury to try both. The challenge, then, is to balance knowing everything about nothing versus knowing nothing about everything!

Saturday, December 11, 1999 at 07:50:35 (EST) = 1999-12-11

TopicLife

(correlates: SeeingThought, LongTails, FreeAction, ...)