Society Calls You a Dilettante. I Call It Strategic Redundancy
For as long as I can remember, I've been told to focus on one thing.
Society labels people like me as scattered. Unfocused. Lacking grit. I always felt like I was doing something wrong because I couldn't force myself to stop starting new things—even when I tried.
The Lie We've Been Sold
Success means picking one lane and staying in it forever. That's what they tell you. Specialists dig deep into a single domain while the rest of us jump from project to project, hobby to hobby, interest to interest. The world calls us dilettantes. We call ourselves failures for not being able to focus like everyone else.
Here's the thing though—it's complete nonsense.
The full quote everyone misses is "a jack of all trades is a master of none, but often times better than a master of one." Society conveniently forgets the second half. Or maybe they never wanted you to hear it in the first place.
What I Discovered at 47
I watched this video titled "If You Have Too Many Interests, You Are Probably Built For The 'M-Shaped' Future" and something just... clicked.
I'm not broken. I'm not undisciplined. I'm built differently—and that's been my superpower all along. I just couldn't see it because everyone kept telling me I was doing it wrong.
Since 1998, I've launched more than 20 businesses across wildly different domains. TicaretMerkezi.com landed me in Turkish magazines back in the day. Octeth became the most feature-packed email marketing platform in the market, still powering thousands of businesses worldwide 26 years later. PreviewMyEmail got acquired by SMTP, Inc. Sendloop's still running. Some ventures failed spectacularly. Some are quietly profitable today.
People told me to stop. Pick one. Go deep.
But I couldn't. And looking back now, that inability to focus on just one thing gave me something specialists will never have: redundancy.
Redundancy Is Your Safety Net
Life operates in cycles—ups and downs, wins and losses, boom markets and recessions. When one business hit a wall, I had the skills to pivot immediately. When one market died (and believe me, I've seen entire markets disappear overnight), I could build in another without needing to learn everything from scratch.
I never needed to rely on anyone else because I'd accumulated knowledge across marketing, software development, design, sales, business operations, and product management. Not surface-level knowledge either—actual hands-on experience from building real businesses that made real money (or lost it).
Specialists become fragile when their industry changes. If AI replaces your specialized skill tomorrow, you're terrified. You should be. But if you've built multiple pillars of expertise across different domains? You adapt. You pivot. You survive.
The video mentioned this fascinating fact: elephants rarely get cancer because they have massive genetic redundancy—multiple copies of cancer-fighting genes working as backup systems. Your diverse skills work the same way. They're backup systems ensuring you never become obsolete, never get caught flat-footed when the world shifts under your feet.
The Graveyard of Hobbies Isn't Failure
Every abandoned project wasn't a waste of time. Every side hustle that fizzled out wasn't proof you lack focus or can't finish things. They were semesters in a self-directed university where you got to choose the curriculum.
You learned something. You applied it. You moved on when curiosity called you elsewhere.
IPMonitor, ClickMonk, HelpMonk, Wridea, ContactWidget, 50saas, Kayra, ReferralMagic, QuickTests, TraceRank—some of these you've probably never heard of because they didn't make it. But I learned something crucial from every single one. Those "failures" taught me things I still use today in businesses that actually work.
The modern world is what psychologists call a "wicked environment"—the rules change constantly, unpredictably. Specialists thrive in "kind environments" where patterns stay stable and repetition leads to mastery. But we don't live there anymore (if we ever did). You've been unconsciously preparing for a world that rewards adaptability, not depth.
Your Value Is in Synthesis, Not Depth
Specialists solve problems using what researchers call "near transfer"—applying familiar solutions to similar problems they've seen before. You use "far transfer"—taking a concept from one completely unrelated field and applying it somewhere entirely new.
That's where innovation actually lives.
A web developer who also knows beekeeping understands organic systems and growth cycles in ways a pure technologist never will. A marketer who builds software sees customer behavior through a lens specialists miss completely. You bridge worlds others can't even perceive—because they've only ever lived in one world.
Your value isn't in competing with specialists on depth. You'll lose that game every time. Your value is in synthesis—connecting dots across domains that specialists didn't even know existed.
This Is Your Permission Slip
If you've spent your life jumping between interests, building things that excite you, learning skills that don't fit neatly on a resume—you're not doing it wrong.
You're building an M-shaped mind. Multiple pillars of depth connected by bridges of curiosity.
Stop apologizing for your scattered interests. Stop feeling guilty for not picking one thing and sticking with it for 30 years. Your ability to synthesize across domains is genuinely rare. Your redundancy is strength. Your adaptability is the ultimate competitive advantage in a world that punishes rigidity and rewards the ability to pivot fast.
Watch the video. Recognize yourself in it. Then use your superpower wisely—because the world needs more people who can bridge the gaps between specialized silos.
We've been doing it right all along.
