Expert at Something, Specialized at Nothing
Reading Karpathy’s advice to PhD students forced an honest look in the mirror. His point is that some things can’t be cheated — a startup, a doctorate. You need real fundamentals; you have to solve the hard problems. And that hit me, because I’ve known since childhood that I could usually cheat my way to what I wanted.
The moment of clarity came in high school, preparing for a physics olympiad mostly on my own, watching whatever I could find online. For the first time I saw the actual story of why the math works — and realized everything school had taught me before was memorization. I had been told I was smart. I often ranked first. But it was pattern-matching: I memorized the shapes of answers, not the reasoning underneath. Ask me to explain a basic concept simply and I couldn’t, which is the surest proof of not understanding it. I don’t fully blame my teachers; they were probably doing the best they could with how they were taught.
So I made a list of my easy paths. Cheated in subjects I decided wouldn’t matter. Picked a university degree not from desire but from fear of unemployment. Took courses because they were easy, not because I was curious. And I justified all of it with a comfortable slogan: this is the era of exploration. Specialization seemed stupid — specialize and you become boring, capable only of talking about your one narrow thing.
But here’s the contradiction I can’t argue away: underneath the exploration excuse, there’s a deep feeling that I want to be an expert at something. Not specialized — expert. I want one problem that only I can solve. I don’t want to work on things anyone else could do. I don’t know whether that’s a bias I should remove or the truest thing about me, but I keep assuming fulfillment lives on the other side of it. I like philosophy; I like formulating things; I like abstract thought. In the end, maybe the expert is a specialist — just one who arrived by wanting rather than by narrowing.
There’s a cost to always choosing easy, and I’ve paid it. Graduating mainly to collect the paper. Doing work designed to impress people, while knowing nobody is actually impressed by a big title at a big company doing clerk-shaped tasks. Months spent trying to break out and find what I really want, still without an answer. Sometimes I wonder if “I don’t know what I want” is itself something I planted in my own unconscious — as if repeating “I know what I want” ninety-nine times into a mirror could undo it. It doesn’t work.
What I actually want, when I’m honest, is to contemplate. To think about how so many people live lives they don’t enjoy, doing work that means nothing to them, gathering with people they don’t care about, all under the alibi of networking. I want to read what I enjoy and learn what I choose. And I want to make something. Writing this made me realize that might be the answer hiding in plain sight: creating is the thing I want.
The cost of doing easy things is hard. It compounds badly over a lifetime. Life cannot be cheated. Some people inherit fortunes or win lotteries, but there’s nothing proud or substantial in that — anything not won through your own struggle feels hollow. Maybe that belief is biased. I believe it anyway, as close to a law as I know.
Drafted with AI assistance from my personal journal (2024-10-08), then edited by me. See On AI Assistance.