Many intellectuals with high accomplishments seem to assume that those accomplishments confer validity to their notions about a broad swath of issues, ranging far beyond the scope of their accomplishments.
For me, it's an easy way to make money. I'm just hitting a ball over a net. Of course, I've grown up with it. It's a part of me. It's all I really know how to do.
As time goes on, I get more and more convinced that the right method in investment is to put fairly large sums into enterprises which one thinks one knows something about and in the management of which one thoroughly believes. It is a mistake to think that one limits one's risk by spreading too much between enterprises about which one knows little and has no reason for special confidence. . . . One's knowledge and experience are definitely limited and there are seldom more than two or three enterprises at any given time in which I personally feel myself entitled to put full confidence.
I know a lot about a few things - mostly useless things.
I'm pretty illiterate when it comes to comics history.
I know a little about a lot of things. But I don't know a lot about everything.
I'm not good at very many things. The stuff I'm good at tends to be the stuff that people know me for.
He [the "specialist"] is one who, out of all that has to be known in order to be a man of judgment, is only acquainted with one science, and even of that one only knows the small corner in which he is an active investigator. He even proclaims it as a virtue that he takes no cognisance of what lies outside the narrow territory specially cultivated by himself, and gives the name of "dilettantism" to any curiosity for the general scheme of knowledge.
My abilities on the computer are limited pretty much to iTunes and YouTube. I check my email as much as anybody, but I'm more old-fashioned in a certain sense.
The only thing Hulk Hogan ever knew was how to make Hulk Hogan. He couldn't tell you how to make AJ Styles or Samoa Joe. What's Hulk Hogan going to tell Samoa Joe? He doesn't know anything to even tell him; he's got zero to offer.
I know something about the civilization of China, with my background, obviously, and I think I know something about American history. But that's about all. And I've traveled all over the world, and for a long time I didn't know very much about it, really.
I am not versed in production software. I have basic knowledge, but it ends there.
I'm just this committed dilettante. I think what I've found is that I've tried to do a lot of different things in my life and discovered I'm not as good at them as I'd want to be.
I've played every instrument you could possibly think of for 10 minutes. So I'm mediocre at everything. I can play drums, guitar, piano, violin, saxophone, clarinet, flute... Just not well.
Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?
So I have the classic amateur's technique; I know some very tricky bits and I have large gaping holes.
I'm trained as a teacher; that's the only thing I've got a certificate for.
I have this magpie instinct for the next glittering object. There are one or two things I know I can't write about, though: DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor.
I've got no business acumen whatsoever.
I know a little bit about a great many things and not enough about any one to make a living in these times.
A smattering of everything, and a knowledge of nothing.
I do not believe that artists or actors and people should be out there like voicing their full-blown opinions on politics because, let's face it, at the end of the day, I'm not that smart of a guy.
One of the problems with expertise is that people have it in some domains and not in others.
I'm really a very weak musicologist. Wish it weren't so, but there's only so much you can dig deeply into in one lifetime, as if you hadn't noticed.
Even those to whom Providence has allotted greater strength of understanding can expect only to improve a single science.
