Integrate both Breath and Depth in Life Long Learning

I was having bubble tea with an SDE friend from a different Amazon org last week, enjoying the late afternoon sunshine of California. Then he asked: “After 8 years working in the industry, I am still being leveled as an SDE II. I seemed to have learned a lot, but I don’t really specialize in anything… what should I do next in my career?” Ah, I have been there before. The anxiety of what to do next! I work in a very specialized area of cyber security: key management of cryptography, and even more specifically - Hardware Security Module (HSM). So I’ve gone to the Depth, I am specialized? A lot of people, even educators, seem to believe that in learning we either go for the breath, or go for the depth, there is nothing in between. But I found true learning needs to integrate both depth and breath into the cognitive acquisition of knowledge. Depth without breath is narrow. You can not really go deeply without some peripheral knowledge of related “things”. If someone claim to be an expert of HSM without sufficient understanding of TLS, PKI, TCP/IP and Trust Computing design etc,. I will be very worried. Breath without depth is shallow. You can’t really understand anything without understanding something deeply. Someone who claims to be a front end engineer need to know JavaScript, Http, TLS, TCP/IP all the way down sufficiently. Without the depth in at least one area, what you know are just some terminologies on the surface level, the stuff you read for 30 seconds after googling around. There is no depth without breath, no breath without depth. So I told the engineer friend: “Pick an area you are passionate about, go down deep, become an expert, make sure you are better than 99% of the people who work in this area.” “But whatever you do, get one level deeper and wider. If you work on Web development, one level deeper might be HTTP. One level wider might be knowing Micro-front-end architecture., or transportation layer security” Hegel and Marx both warned about “self-alienation: to be estranged from one's essential … the absence of meaning in one's life, consequent to being coerced to lead a life without opportunity for self-fulfillment, without the opportunity to become actualized, to become one's self.” To me, getting both breath and depth is about seeing the tree and forest at the same time. It is an existential problem, not just a career choice: you can’t pick one and ignore the other. To feel the meaning of life, you need to get both depth and breath.