Sacrificing everything for skill is a sure path to mental death.

One of my previous colleagues is a brilliant programmer. He can fit a very large, complex domain area into his head and come up with an efficient and elegant architectural solution really quickly. I saw him as my inspiration and learned a lot from him.

My experience with him aside from programming, on the other hand, wasn’t exactly the same – he was close-minded and violent in his ways of thinking. He was surprisingly insensitive to new ideas for a guy who works with programming concepts every day. He had almost no hobbies or interests in life.

He sacrificed his personality and pretty much everything he had for raw skill, which effectively made him a coding machine. He pathologically couldn’t explore the new ways of thinking and learn new kinds of reasoning.

When you talk to him about something that isn’t related to programming, you see just that – a machine. There was no spark in his eyes anymore.

When we’re born, we’re gifted with a large amount of learning resource. Some people get more, some people get less. As we grow, we invest this resource in exchange for certain skills and abilities. The resource is also lost as you age, even if you don’t invest it. But we’re quick to invest – 10 000 abstract points to learn enough to get a job, 500 for a new hobby and so on.

If you see a person who’s a brilliant performer and have a great personality at the same time, there’s nothing magical – he was just born with more learning ability and this allowed him to invest more into skills and still have something left.

If you invest everything into just one skill, there’ll be nothing left for you to remain a human.

There is a great channel that classifies animals as RPG characters. Looking through these videos, you clearly can see a pattern – animals who invest all their “points” into just one ability are unbalanced and thus are weaker, even though they can perform this exact ability really well.

There’s no person or organization on earth that can take the huge amount of money you made with your immense skill and bring your personality back.

Learn only the necessary things. Don’t forget about things aside from coding – life isn’t just about creating products and making money. If you feel like learning chess or Chinese philosophy – go for it.

Invest your points carefully.