How  Smart People Sabotage Their Success
&gt; <i>4. Smart people get bored easily. Being smart is not exactly the same as being curious, but if you have both these qualities you might find yourself becoming easily bored with executing the same behaviors over and over. Some types of success stem from creativity, but other types come from becoming an expert in a niche and performing a set of behaviors repeatedly. If you’re smart, curious, and have a love of learning, you might find you quickly lose interest in anything once you’ve figured it out. The execution side of performance might bore you, and you’d rather constantly be learning new things. This can end up being less lucrative than finding a niche and repeating the same formula, but that might seem too boring or unchallenging to you.</i><p>I&#x27;ve been wrestling with this for most of my career so far.  I think it&#x27;s all about striking the right balance.  If you&#x27;re not constantly learning you will stagnate.  At the same time, jumping continuously from learning one new thing to another (esp. if the things are not very inter-related) can spread yourself too thin: you need to &quot;go deep&quot; on some things to become an effective&#x2F;valuable contributor.<p>I sometimes feel resentful of the amount of time I&#x27;ve spent as a software engineer dealing with what I often <i>feel</i> is boring or pure B.S. (e.g. almost everything other than designing&#x2F;building some novel complex system from scratch). But in reality looking back I see that a lot of that sh*t-shoveling has actually made me much better and wiser at my profession, despite how mind-numbing and boring it often was.  So I&#x27;m trying to keep that perspective to get me through those really dull days when I want to just rage-quit and move to a rural commune :)