Sampling and specialization

Watching people in sports and business, I keep noticing something. The cricketer who played baseball first has better timing. The one who only played cricket has cleaner technique. Both are good, but they're good in different ways, and the difference seems to come from what they did before, not just how long they've practised.

Colonel Sanders spent decades in unrelated jobs before KFC. Steve Jobs studied calligraphy. The people who built something distinctive often didn't take the direct path.

Buffett seems to break this. He's been investing since he was eleven. No real sampling, just compounding depth. And yet, he reads constantly across history, psychology, business. So maybe the sampling did happen, just sideways. Not iteratively, but in parallel.

It might not be sampling versus specialisation. It might be whether you're learning from adjacent domains while you go deep, or staying insular. The cricketer who only plays cricket is missing the cross-pollination. The Buffett kind of specialist isn't.

I notice this in my own arc. Basketball, then public speaking, then computer science, then data science, then finance. Each phase shaped how I read the next. Data science wouldn't have meant much without the sports interest. Finance wouldn't have landed without the tech base. None of it was planned, it just kept finding resonance.

I'm not fully sure about this. Some of it might be a story I'm building in hindsight. The samplers who didn't make anything of it don't show up in these examples, which is a problem. Pure insularity still seems to have a cost, but I'd want to sit with this longer before saying more.