I love playing LEGO with my kids. Just like when I was a kid, I’ve gotta paw through giant bins of pieces, sifting and scanning to find what I need.
Today it was airplane parts. I realized something I’ve been tacitly aware of all my years of playing LEGO. When I’m looking for more than one piece, I find nothing. When I focus on one specific item, I end up also finding other things I need, or noticing things I didn’t know I needed.
This is the same reason I try to relax young people when they worry about the first job they take, and whether getting good at, say, sales, will somehow prevent them from doing other things later. It won’t. In fact, getting deeply good at almost anything probably increases the odds you can get good at other things. It’s for the same reason you can’t find anything when you try to find four pieces at once, but you find several when you focus on one.
It’s the act of focused, deep LEGO searching that leads to discoveries. Picking a single piece hones your eyes and mind. You become good at finding pieces in general by trying with all your might to find a specific piece.
The act of mastering a single type of work teaches you how to master things more than it teaches you the thing you master. Diving deep into focused acquisition and practice of a new skill is highly transferable to other skills. Getting lost in something is often the best way to find other things.
Conversely, just like shallow brain overload prevents fruitful digging when you search for several pieces at once, shallow skill and interest overload can prevent you from meaningful self-discovery and confidence/knowledge/network/experience building in your life and career.
Don’t be afraid to narrow your focus. You’ll find the immediate thing you’re looking for faster, become better at finding things in general, and probably stumble upon interesting opportunities in unknown shapes along the way.
*An obvious exception is if you’re doing something you truly hate that sucks your soul. Don’t master that. Quit. Another exception might be if what you’re doing is of unclear value but has an extremely high opportunity and exit cost. Think law or medical school. Then you might want to try low-cost dabbling before you go all-in.