| I'd also suggest people making these requests to try and expand their interests to make themselves more rounded and valuable. For example I'm totally the kind of person that likes to jump from one thing to another cause I like the challenge and I get bored quick otherwise. But instead of jumping ship cause the challenge is gone I try to find a different closely related challenge. Here's a couple of techniques for anyone looking to do the same: 1. Look at the 'supply chain' of inputs and outputs from your problem area. Are there new inefficiencies somewhere in the stack that you can dig into and solve, and leverage your new knowledge. This could mean a whole new area of things to learn in order to investigate or solve those problems. 2. Never accept the status quo. Every time you're asked to do something else, treat that as an opportunity to find one thing that you can improve in the related systems. Here you'll learn the new system, but you'll also learn how to pick worthwhile areas for improvement. 3. Be reflective and review what you found interesting and what you didn't and dig into the ones you didn't find interesting. Ask yourself why you didn't like things; was it cause it was too difficult to pick up? was it cause you don't like people problems? was it just too big a problem to tackle? Dig in more and ask why again (like the Toyota 5 Whys). Eventually you should be able to find a problem area that you can clearly define and potentially work on to improve. I realize these 3 techniques won't necessarily lead to 'cool tech problems', but that's kinda the point! If you can get yourself interested in solving related problem areas, you'll find you pick up a lot of useful knowledge and value that you can apply in many other areas you wouldn't have first thought of, all while always jumping between things and not getting bored! (edit: formatting) |
If you have a broad interest there's like a million different ways to pivot and branch off to learn different things.