But the good news is you just kinda learn quite a bit about every hobby you pick up, so people are always impressed with how much random stuff you know.
You remember the random stuff you read?
It’s in and out. I feel that people would actually think I’m smart if I could recall even 2% of all the shit I learn on demand.
My memory is really, really good. It’s my recall that’s crap. Feels more like my brain works like RAM and not a hard drive in that my memories are randomly accessed.
If it was Ram then everything you learned would disappear when you went to sleep. But it would all be easily accessible at all times instantly.
A hard drive sounds way more appropriate. It’s really good at following a single chain of information. It is terrible at randomly accessing information but it’s all there. The problem of course is that - people don’t talk as one long chain. There are tangents and then the drive must seek which is slow.
Not necessarily in a way where I can effectively demonstrate everything I’ve learned, but sure, a lot goes somewhere in the back of my memory bank. It’s created job opportunities for me in disruptive tech fields because I’m just able to absorb so much in that initial hyperfocus phase, and come across like a subject matter expert on something I just heard about a couple of weeks ago. Sucks when you land in what seems to be a great position and just lose interest in the field though. Good recipe for imposter syndrome
Not in tech anymore but I definitely do this with my jobs. It really sucks because I could be doing so much more but I just can’t be bothered to care after the I got a new job and this is interesting phase. But at least I have these random bits of information that I can pretend to be smart with thst come up at the most inopportune times. 🤣 I feel you on the imposter syndrome.
With that I relate. I don’t have knowledge, but only surface information about a variety of topics, because I fricking jump from one thing and the other, and this maddens me.
My knowledge base has the breadth of an ocean, but the depth of a puddle.
This is true, though sometimes one may unintentionally come across as a “know it all” (I know this from experience). Having an unending number of hobbies and the philosophy of “there is no such thing as useless knowledge”, just leads to accruing knowledge on a wide breadth of topics and surprising depth on some of the more esoteric.
I can tell you about some of the practical efforts required to safely raise chickens in the PNW (free-range, in a yard, or chicken tractors), several forms of metal casting, basic garment construction, luthiery, gardening, archery, industrial microbiology, and a number of other things. My former boss would often ask if I knew anything about a given unusual topic that came up in conversation, just to see if he could find something that I didn’t have any knowledge or experience with (really old programming languages like COBOL were among the winners). Now, I’m currently really into digital electronics, so, I’m shopping around for an oscilloscope and other equipment that would allow me to reverse engineer some of the newer protocols.
