Happy Friday everybody. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and you're listening to another Friday refill episode of Developer Tea. One of the questions that I've heard come from listeners of this show that I've heard in person that I hear all the time in this industry is what do I need to learn next? What do I need to pick up? What skills are going to make me valuable? And very often the intuitive answer that a lot of engineers kind of fill in the blank with is something new, something new, not necessarily new on the market although there's got another tendency to answer with the newest thing, but something new to you. You should learn something that is going to give you a new perspective, a new set of skills, something you don't know yet. And this kind of makes sense intuitively. Why would you spend your time not learning something new? But in today's episode I want to encourage you down the path of mastery. You see, I think the fallacy that we all kind of intuitively believe is that mastery in one subject or mastery in one direction necessarily requires ignoring everything else. You become a specialist, you become deeply skilled in one area that you're going to be completely useless in all other areas. The reason that I think this is a fallacy is because virtually every person that I've met that I would consider a master in a given situation, a master at a given set of skills, they are not totally and utterly useless in every other area. In fact, you should think about mastery very much like you think about a tree. As you master something, the primary kind of trunk of your skills is going to become the majority of that tree, the largest part. But in order for that tree to grow, it can't just be reliant on the trunk. It needs deep roots, for example. And it certainly needs branches. And so you can imagine that as your skills in one area grow, they grow like a tree. And because you are becoming a master in one area, your ability to relate, your ability to relate to other similar areas of skills improves. You have a solid foundation in one area. And so understanding connections to other skill sets becomes much easier. Instead of thinking about mastery as choosing an exclusive pathway, this is kind of the mental model that I think a lot of people have, if they think about their career progression as a kind of path, a road, and that at any given point, they might take a turn down a road that's hard to come back from. Instead, I want you to think about your career as something that you cultivate. Not as a road, not as a path, not as something that has treacherous and potentially irreversible ways to travel through it, but instead about an organic and breathing subject that is unique. If you think about your path through your career as something that is organic and unique, then the restrictions that you imagine coming with mastery, they just dissolve. And so I want you to, I want to encourage you to focus on mastery if you aren't yet, even though there is some warning in the industry about not being a generalist and becoming a specialist. If you truly become a master in a subset of skills, then your ability to pick up new skills is going to become your most prized ability. Instead of thinking about excluding all of those other skills, in a way, you are building a base level skill of acquiring skills. That in and of itself is a skill. And so if you're honing and you're constantly improving in one area, you're very likely to find things that are adjacent, right? You're very likely to connect the dots beyond this seemingly narrow skill set. When people tell you that you need to focus on becoming a generalist, that you need to learn a hundred different things, I'm going to formally disagreeing with that perspective. And instead, focus on a lens. Focus on a lens of your skills and chase after that become incredibly proficient in a narrow set. Along the way, make sure you're checking yourself because if you're excluding skills because they're not on that specific narrow set, that's not the goal either. Instead, you should think about other skills as supporting your primary set of mastery skills. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. This Friday refill of Developer Tea. If you enjoyed this episode, then please, you can give back to the show by leaving us a rating and review in iTunes. These are indeed one of the most important things, not only for me to learn more, to improve this show, but also for other engineers who are looking for podcasts like this one to find and then decide to download this show. So your ratings and reviews make a huge difference. If you enjoy conversations like these, but you don't want it to be one sided, you don't want to just listen, you want to contribute to the conversation. You can join the Developer Tea discord, head over to developertea.com slash discord. Thanks again for listening and until next time, enjoy your tea.