I am not as young as I once was, but I am much wiser than I have ever been. Due to the vicissitudes that life visited upon me from 2008 to 2012, I have reinvented my life. Life 2.o if you’ll indulge me.

This time around I vowed to do what I enjoyed to make my living. After all, if decades of work can be wiped away so quickly due to the obscene greed of the demagogues and plutocrats, you may as well enjoy the ride. Old wisdom that’s taken me a lifetime to truly understand and internalize.

Any newbie will be happy to rage on about the overwhelming wave of potential paths of learning you face when you decide to become a developer. It seems simple at first. Html, CSS. Very learnable. Achievable. Maybe I can learn these, make a small living, and enjoy my days doing it. But before you master these you realize that the market wants you to know a little more. PHP. Javascript. So you begin to explore these. Your bookmarks and your bookshelves get a little more bloated with links and tomes. And it doesn’t stop. Soon you are coming across words like framesworks, Bootstrap, Foundations, and _underscore. So you try to understand what these are, how they fit in and whether you need to know them. But before you even understand what they mean, more words crop up. Angular, React, Ajax, APIs. C# and C++. Version control, Git, and Github. WAMP and MAMP. Atom and Sublime Text. And they keep coming, and coming, until you think your head will explode and you are considering a job as a commercial truck driver.

Here is the solution. Have you ever heard the expression, “inch deep, mile wide?” Or one of my mother’s favorites, “Jack of all trades, master of none.” These phrases aren’t used to describe a favorable situation. Your goal is the opposite. Simplicity.

I have never been as happy as I have become since I learned to embrace a more simplified life. I had to learn many lessons before I finally understood why and how to do this. It was years before “the dime dropped.” It took many years and lessons before I really realized that once I had relative safety, food, and shelter, that no amount of money would bring me additional happiness. Perhaps temporary pleasure, but not lasting happiness. That comes from another place (which maybe I’ll talk about at another time.)

So the answer is simplicity. Pick something. Master it. Build on it. Ignore all the additional detritus. If it has true value, it will still be there when it is time to learn it. In truth, I suspect much of it will be replaced, and you will have saved yourself a great deal of time learning something that was due to become obsolete anyway.

A minor addendum to those of you who are saying “but I have to learn it NOW! I need to earn a living.” You will. Have you ever seen someone standing on the street, holding out their hat with one hand, and smoking a tailor made cigarette with the other? You’ll manage. And trying to master 10 things at once won’t get you there faster.