[presidentender]

I think there's a place for a Renaissance man; I fancy myself a fledgling. But the Renaissance man of yore was independently wealthy, or engaged in a profitable enterprise not accessible to the mundanes: the combination of useful breadth and interesting depth requires resources both temporal and monetary.

So to focus on a largely dull, specialized and marketable education in one's youth is no sin. It allows the development of that depth later on.

There is room for abstract math and creative writing and painting and essay writing, but they should be a side dish to the main course of "Getting Shit Done."

[hugh3]

I've always said that becoming a generalist is a two-step process:

1. Become a specialist

2. Become a generalist

Step one is important because it gives you a useful and marketable skill to support yourself while you're working on step two, but also because it means you understand what it really means to be an expert on something. This gives you some humility and perspective when you start attacking all the other domains of human knowledge.