People think in careers all the time, but I think from time to time it's more helpful to think in a more "first principles" manner.
Focusing on a particular discipline or technical skill works for a lot of people when the world needs those skills, and to a larger extent the need is defined by the supply. If you have those skills in your populace, why not use them?
But things change and there's no way of predicting where the masses are going to go and what particular skills are going to be in demand. At the end of the day, there's no guarantee that your particular skill will fit in with the global "plan".
What I've seen though is that you can't really go wrong if you just work on generally challenging and developing yourself and being active. People who work like this tend to even be at the forefront of change.
- After all, there were no M.S.'s in Data Science before data science became a thing. When data science was being in its infancy it was just smart people applying computational models to business data. It was experts from different fields coming together and defining the practice
- From the perspective of someone who wants to hire people to work for them, it's good to have specialists who are extremely good at what they do, but otherwise or in lieu of that you just want smart, well-rounded people who can problem solve and are a pleasure to work with, people you can communicate with and will understand your vision
At the end of the day, you can practically work on anything to develop those skills. It's what people like to call "soft skills". It's about developing yourself as a human. It's those skills that are useful in any sort of work: intelligence (emotional and cognitive), communication, critical thinking.
There are also skills you develop that aren't as general, but generalizable -- developing yourself as a knowledge base. For example, if you like doing Raspberry Pi projects in your spare time, it's likely that you're going to be able to apply that to a business. Even if you can't directly use it, you'll likely find it easier to learn more technical subjects because of the similar "thought-patterns"*. You're building up patterns of thinking that can be easily applied elsewhere.
And statistically speaking, as long as that base of knowledge upwards, you're likely going to be able to apply it somewhere. For instance, as a child you're impressed that your parents can seemingly do everthing -- and that's because they have years of this thing called "experience" on you. This is what I call the "fungibility of experience". It happens because our world is vast and interconnected -- really, any experience is useful somewhere, someday.
Often, it's less important what you do, and more important that you do -- maximize "resource production" per given time, even though these "resources" don't seem so "fungible" at the time.
So based off of this, this would be my "career advice" to myself:
- Specializing isn't bad. Specializing builds character, intelligence, complexity. So invest time in learning something deeply, but as you progress, keep an eye on how much you are developing as a human and as a knowledge base as opposed to how much you are simply advancing in that particular subject.
- Practical example: If you're a engineer, pick up a book on, I don't know, anthropology. Read different stuff. Learn an instrument, I don't know. More engineering makes you better at engineering, but has diminishing returns on making you a better human.
- Generalizing is good. Don't be afraid of picking up new things (and dropping them) to the extent that they provide you with human and knowledge enrichment, and deeply enough where you're actually building some complexity and knowledge rather than dabbling. Connect with others, fast-track your knowledge rather than discovering everything yourself. Don't worry about if it's a waste of time, because again, fungibility of experience.
- Practical example: Read research papers in fields you've never even heard of. You'd be surprised at the novelty -- there is a lot of profound stuff on things you never even gave a thought to, if you go high-level enough
- Be open to a wide range of opportunities. Experiential fungibility only happens in a sufficiently large system, and if you're closed off to opportunities, you're cloistering yourself in a smaller subsystem. Don't limit your opportunities to, say, "environmental psychology" because that's what you got you Ph.D. in. Labels are just labels.
- Practical example: Talk to people. What are their needs? Keep up with the news, but not just the mainstream. Where do you think you can help?
- If nothing else, focus on simply doing, and more importantly, trying. Maximize that vs. the time you have. Remember, it's not the fungibility of time, it's the fungibility of experience. Just because you've been around longer doesn't make you any wiser.
* It's what people call "transferable skills", basically -- I just don't like thinking about skills that exist in domains and transferring, but skills that exist in their own right, in a platonic sense if you will, outside of any particular domain of application. It's also imprecise because you could either be talking about skills that are directly applicable in say, a new job, or skills that aren't directly usable, but help you learn your new job by analogy. People actually have been using the term "mental model" a lot more now, which is pretty much what I'm talking about.
