> I stop when I find a solution to the problem

That.

I’ve embraced that I cannot direct which topic my self-directed learning will take up and sustain (almost none of which ends up going toward tech stuff, aside from a span of some years in my teens and early 20s—and all of that was motivated by wanting to accomplish specific things with computers) and rely on assignments to motivate me for career-relevant learning.

I’ll learn whatever it takes to get the job done. Then stop, because I don’t actually care about the tech per se, most of the time, and trying to force myself to learn “just because” does nothing but make me miserable and waste time.

This isn’t even “how I approach learning as a generalist”, it’s how I became a generalist.

My interest in continuing to fiddle with stuff after the job’s done is basically zero.

My experience has been that it takes amazingly little effort to be above-median among practitioners at a lot of things. How many React developers have spent one entire hour reading through the core logic of React itself? How many people working with LLMs have read the Attention Is All You Need paper? How many people read about the disk storage layout of a database they’ve been told to use? It’s way less than half. It takes so very little to stand out.

That's funny, I often love learning for the sake of.. experimenting, building things. I just recognize that I cannot do it all and prioritize immediate needs first.

So what happens when you can't find a solution to your problem and hit the edges of current research even specialists cannot buckle?