I wonder how this works out for students.

I'm in my third year of college. I love to mess around with whatever piece of tech I can get my hands on. For example, this year I've tried out Scala, MongoDB, Pylons, ArchLinux, x86_64 assembly, Tcl, and writing Python extensions in C. I've also done a fair bit of reading on compilers and virtual machines, but not enough to write one myself. Besides, of course, the usual reading I do. What do I have to show for all this? A slightly larger ~/src/. What did I learn from all this? More than I can describe in words.

I know loads of people who have a laser-beam focus. Unlike me, these people get more done. They actually finish projects. On the one hand, I would love to have made sizeable contributions to projects I'm passionate about but on the other hand, I don't think I can or even want to have that laser-beam focus. At the end of the day, I'd rather be a happy Jack-of-all-trades than an unhappy master-of-one.

Of course, I get flak for this all the time, which makes me wonder if everyone is right and I'm just too stupid to see the error of my ways.