Ask HN: How to admit yourself that you cannot learn everything?

May I suggest: you may want to think about for whom you are doing all this self improvement. Are you seeking to be more valuable to others, as they judge your value, or are you serving your own needs? Making yourself useful is great, but then others will use you until you break, if you let them. If you're driving yourself that way, be sure the ends are worth it.

2. Realize that it is very possible to become an expert in targeted areas.

3. Pick the targeted area that you enjoy the most and that makes the most $$$.

4. DO SOMETHING with the knowledge. Don't just acquire knowledge, because you will forget it. Build something useful... something that you can show off! THAT is the point at which people will start looking at you as the expert.

Personal note: I decided that I wanted to create a useful, non-trivial programming language, so I built one entirely on video. Github link: https://github.com/coreyp1/Tang Youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZqirAnnqaCZ8lT8w7p2P...

Guess what? NOBODY is going to watch the videos, and I know that. But I did it for myself. People look at 2 things: the end result, and the fact that it was me that did it. I'm STILL not an expert at Vim, Flex, Bison, ICU, Make, or programming language design in general, but I absolutely know much, much more than I did starting out, and I learned things that I didn't anticipate. Most of all, though, I found the process personally very rewarding.

I have decided to make peace with the belief that I can master anything that I focus on, generally speaking. With that settled, now I only have to decide where to put that focus, and have the discipline to stick with it long enough to achieve my goal.

The best thing I do that helped is to say "fuck you" to yourself and spend more time thinking (like a philosopher) about the world and my view on it. I couldn't really explain how but it really helps me.

So I guess I recommend trying to take an external view on your problems instead of studying to fix them as it is, to me, the best self-improvement thing anyone could obtain.

Become an expert in the thing you want to do, not whatever your peers are doing. Spend your time learning that thing deeply. Master it.

Then you are no longer able to be called impostor, even by yourself.

You can learn anything, but not everything. Some things take much longer to learn than others. Pick your battles.

Peace outside,

self

every day you reboot with the latest version of CuriosityOS which from the command prompt (daydream.exe) you can explore anything and everything that seems interesting. every day, new insights, knowledge, and observations are saved to the image and integrated with the next day's build.