I had a thought a while back about how education systems are somewhat bad proxies for the type of work you want to do. There are many factors aside from just pure method that determine good fit, such as degrees of freedom, number of collaborators, market saturation and maturity, and feedback cycle lengths, etc.

These vary greatly in “real life” but are almost always restricted in education systems. For instance, simple things like “there is a right answer to this question”, “you can finish this task in less than a week” and of course “an older more experienced person will judge your work” are true in school but vary greatly in the wild.

I’ve found that people’s true passion axes mostly aren’t aligned with specific sub-fields (like say theoretical astrophysics, improv jazz saxophone), but tend to orient themselves towards higher level features. As someone who used to think that narrow specialization is paramount, this realization is incredibly liberating (also kinda missing from PGs post – I think he’s missing or glossing over an important aspect here).