“All that endless pursuit of excellent, yet I am not excellent.”

When learning something, I often grapple with the dilemma between whether to go deep or go wide. Specifically:

  • To get started, do I follow a series of rabbitholes, or browse around sibling concepts first?
  • When is the rabbithole too deep and I need to get back up?
  • When is the browsing too broad and start becoming irrelevant/distracting?
  • In the long run, how should I manage toggling between going deep and going wide?

When I started college 4 years ago, I thought that I had spent enough time browsing in my high school years, and if I want to be excellent in anything, I had to be laser-focused for the rest of my degree. Maybe I was an edge case: I had been knee-deep in philosophy and humanities for the entirety of my high school, and I felt like I have to do significantly more work to catch up with people in tech around me who had experience and exposure since as early as middle school. With that, I went into Computer Science undisturbed, not really looking around, taking all the courses I think was relevant, at the same time foregoing all the courses I think do not directly contribute to my progress.

I’m graduating in a month, with said Computer Science degree. I regretted none of it.

But I have other doubts. Specifically, was I specializing too early on?

Now, after I have had my first job, I am thinking about how I would progress next. What domain am I going to go into? What domains have the problems that tickles my fancy, that I can see myself working in for years down the line?

And this is where I realized: I haven’t browsed enough. Going deep at this moment in time would mean keep doing whatever my first job is until it is undeniable that I have to switch. This decision felt too significant for me to handle in such mindless manner.

So for now, going wide is probably my next move. I am personally not a believer of switching jobs only after 1-2 years, so to be able to balance both, I need to think very carefully, and ask as many people as I can.

Even with a “next move” ready in queue, my head constantly looms around the thought that I might be fumbling without knowing. I know that I want to pursure technical excellence, but how do I know that the choices I make right now are the right ones, and that they would propel me towards that ultimate goal?

What if, regardless of all that endless pursuit of excellent, I still wouldn’t be excellent?