- Image via Wikipedia
Yesterday, I finally took a look at Innocentive, a crowd-sourcing site for tough problems (generally very technical problems).
“I’m pretty clever. Maybe I’ll find some time to work on one of the challenges,” I thought to myself.
As I took a look, These are very difficult .
And then upon looking at the previous winners’ bios I saw things like this:
Researcher and Professor at the University of Coimbra. PhD from Coimbra University in 1999 in Organic Chemistry. Main research areas: Porphyrins, Polypyrroles and related compounds in Medicinal and Environmental Sciences.
It’s probably not even worth working on any of these. I don’t have this sort of specialized skill set, I then said.
All the people that had solved the challenges seemed quite impressive and had clearly spent years developing their skills in a given field. Not to say it would be impossible for me to solve one, but it would take a very large time investment.
Looking at what these people had done, I became a bit bummed. I can’t do any of these things. Which reminded of two things:
1) Something one of my basketball coaches said to me, “It’s good to watch other good players and see what they’ve learned to do, but don’t forget what you can do.”
2) The plight of the Generalist. A jack-of-all-trades can do almost anything that needs to be done. Perhaps they develop substantial expertise in an area, but their compulsions cause them to want to work and gain expertise in many fields. However, they’re always outmatched.
-Kevin
8.4.2010
