You say it like these things are mutually exclusive. I know of several people who fall into both categories.
For instance, one of my good friends is one of the smartest programmers I have ever met. I've been bothering him to come down to our hackerspace (shameless plug: http://heatsynclabs.org) for YEARS, and he recently started obliging.
I came in one day and saw him sitting at a workbench hovering over a microscope.
Me: "Hey, Trav, what are you doing?"
Him: "Sharpening knives."
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Ah, yes, of course. Because most people who want to sharpen a knife head down to the lab with a bottle of aluminum oxide because they want to use the microscope.
In the month since then, he has become an encyclopedia of knives. Every material, every manufacturer, every sharpening technique. I was at his house the other day picking him up for a road trip to Colorado, and his workshop is filled with sharpening stones (and rods) and different knives. On the ~9hr drive to CO, we went back and forth, me soaking up seemingly everything I could about knives.
Next month he's going to present at our little Tedx style event at the lab. (Members present on a topic they're knowledgable about).
But this obsessive learning technique isn't limited to knives. Back when we were roomates, he decided that he wanted to build a stepper motor controller, and I don't mean "assemble the kit from adafruit". He wanted to build a controller for the type of ultra-high-performance DC stepper motors found in hobby airplanes and helicopters because he wanted to build a quadcopter, but didn't want to use somebody else's electronics design. I spent that summer learning, by proxy, about control theory, what is back EMF, what do "closed loop" and "open loop" mean? How do motor controllers work, and why?
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Examples of my friend aside, I think that your #2 is enabled by the traits that make up your #1, or that they can at least feedback into each other. You get the super broad domain knowledge because you've gone really, really deep into a few subjects, and can intuit most of the rest of the domain because of it.
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You say it like these things are mutually exclusive. I know of several people who fall into both categories.
For instance, one of my good friends is one of the smartest programmers I have ever met. I've been bothering him to come down to our hackerspace (shameless plug: http://heatsynclabs.org) for YEARS, and he recently started obliging.
I came in one day and saw him sitting at a workbench hovering over a microscope.
Me: "Hey, Trav, what are you doing?"
Him: "Sharpening knives."
---
Ah, yes, of course. Because most people who want to sharpen a knife head down to the lab with a bottle of aluminum oxide because they want to use the microscope.
In the month since then, he has become an encyclopedia of knives. Every material, every manufacturer, every sharpening technique. I was at his house the other day picking him up for a road trip to Colorado, and his workshop is filled with sharpening stones (and rods) and different knives. On the ~9hr drive to CO, we went back and forth, me soaking up seemingly everything I could about knives.
Next month he's going to present at our little Tedx style event at the lab. (Members present on a topic they're knowledgable about).
But this obsessive learning technique isn't limited to knives. Back when we were roomates, he decided that he wanted to build a stepper motor controller, and I don't mean "assemble the kit from adafruit". He wanted to build a controller for the type of ultra-high-performance DC stepper motors found in hobby airplanes and helicopters because he wanted to build a quadcopter, but didn't want to use somebody else's electronics design. I spent that summer learning, by proxy, about control theory, what is back EMF, what do "closed loop" and "open loop" mean? How do motor controllers work, and why?
--
Examples of my friend aside, I think that your #2 is enabled by the traits that make up your #1, or that they can at least feedback into each other. You get the super broad domain knowledge because you've gone really, really deep into a few subjects, and can intuit most of the rest of the domain because of it.