(This is not a tech-related post, so feel free to skip it)

I have a colleague who is a part-time basketball referee.

He mentioned that each weekend, there are fifty, maybe more games of amateur basketball around the metropolitan area of our town, and that not all teams play on a given weekend.

I was kinda taken aback by how casually he mentioned it.
Hold up, I barely know two or three people in real life who play basketball to organize some pick up games. But who knows someone who plays basketball competitively enough to be in a team? Wait, how many basketball teams do exist in our small-ish town? How many basketball referees are hiding in bare sight to accommodate fifty games (each game, I learned, needs at least three officials).

The world is huge

And I mean that in the literal sense. The city I live in, has a population of around one million people, which in the grand scheme of things, is a miniscule number. Greece’s capital has around four or five times more people, and cities like London or Istanbul (Constantinople for some), have even more mind-numbing population numbers.

The world is huge enough to be filled with nearly 8 billion geniuses, frauds, wicked smart and silly people.

There are countless of tech companies you’ve never heard of, doing excellent work out there, pushing the boundaries of the Computer Science, as well as countless others who profit via scummy means.

There is an absurd amount of things you could dedicate your entire life to learn about and become an expert in. From being a Unix Administrator or a long-distance runner, to learning constructed languages, baking bread, to bug fighting or soap carving.

And due to humanity’s collective wisdom from thousands years of progress, there is nowhere near enough time on this earth to truly master everything there is to know about any of these subjects (or any subject, to be honest).

And even if you dedicate every fibre of your being to a specific domain, there will always be some adjacent unexplored domain.

Where are you getting at?

This is not meant to be a pessimistic so-whats-the-point worldview, but it serves to sum up a couple of things I’m learning over and over again.

• Listen and be kind to others; everyone has something to teach you.
• Try your best; success is not guaranteed, but keep working hard and you’ll start to make a dent!
• Have fun; Life’s too short to not do things that make you happy! Keep exploring our vast world, talking to people, and satisfy your curiosity!