Disagree. Peter Thiel wrote about this in zero to one. The "well rounded" candidate is essentially hedging their bets. An indefinite optimist.
> You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat the
future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if
you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it.
Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process
trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a
portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to
start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to
appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a
bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s
ready—for nothing in particular.
> A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity
and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does
it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something
substantive—to be a monopoly of one. This is not what young people do today, because everyone
around them has long since lost faith in a definite world. No one gets into Stanford by excelling at just
one thing, unless that thing happens to involve throwing or catching a leather ball.
Cramming entrance exams is not super useful, but it does select for motivation and ability to focus intensely. Much more useful measure than having your parents set up a fake charity for you to volunteer at.
I can understand his distaste for the indefinite, but does he actually make a strong case for the opposite?
To me this reads as claiming "making fragile choices is good", which outside of very niche situations I'd say is bad advice: like telling a college basketball player to not waste time outside of practice and later watching him go undrafted in the pros.
You also have to look at who is giving the advice. For him it is great if more people take huge risks and burn their youth on moon shot start-ups since, as a VC, he makes all his money off of those people. A world where everybody is a well rounded liberal arts graduate, working a steady job, with comfortable middle class lifestyle and great work life balance would be terrible for him. If you ruin your life following this advice it has zero impact on his life.
He's giving this advice to make his life better, not necessarily to make your life better.
You should read his book. Here is a brief excerpt from the chapter "you are not a lottery ticket"
> THE MOST CONTENTIOUS question in business is whether success comes from luck or skill.
What do successful people say? Malcolm Gladwell, a successful author who writes about
successful people, declares in Outliers that success results from a “patchwork of lucky breaks and
arbitrary advantages.” Warren Buffett famously considers himself a “member of the lucky sperm
club” and a winner of the “ovarian lottery.” Jeff Bezos attributes Amazon’s success to an “incredible
planetary alignment” and jokes that it was “half luck, half good timing, and the rest brains.” Bill Gates
even goes so far as to claim that he “was lucky to be born with certain skills,” though it’s not clear
whether that’s actually possible.
> Perhaps these guys are being strategically humble. However, the phenomenon of serial
entrepreneurship would seem to call into question our tendency to explain success as the product of
chance. Hundreds of people have started multiple multimillion-dollar businesses. A few, like Steve
Jobs, Jack Dorsey, and Elon Musk, have created several multibillion-dollar companies. If success
were mostly a matter of luck, these kinds of serial entrepreneurs probably wouldn’t exist.
> In January 2013, Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square, tweeted to his 2 million followers:
“Success is never accidental.”
>Most of the replies were unambiguously negative. Referencing the tweet in The Atlantic, reporter
Alexis Madrigal wrote that his instinct was to reply: “ ‘Success is never accidental,’ said all
multimillionaire white men.” It’s true that already successful people have an easier time doing new
things, whether due to their networks, wealth, or experience. But perhaps we’ve become too quick to
dismiss anyone who claims to have succeeded according to plan.
> Is there a way to settle this debate objectively? Unfortunately not, because companies are not
experiments. To get a scientific answer about Facebook, for example, we’d have to rewind to 2004,
create 1,000 copies of the world, and start Facebook in each copy to see how many times it would
succeed. But that experiment is impossible. Every company starts in unique circumstances, and every
company starts only once. Statistics doesn’t work when the sample size is one.
> From the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the mid-20th century, luck was something to be
mastered, dominated, and controlled; everyone agreed that you should do what you could, not focus
on what you couldn’t. Ralph Waldo Emerson captured this ethos when he wrote: “Shallow men
believe in luck, believe in circumstances.… Strong men believe in cause and effect.” In 1912, after he
became the first explorer to reach the South Pole, Roald Amundsen wrote: “Victory awaits him who
has everything in order—luck, people call it.” No one pretended that misfortune didn’t exist, but prior
generations believed in making their own luck by working hard.
> If you believe your life is mainly a matter of chance, why read this book? Learning about startups is
worthless if you’re just reading stories about people who won the lottery. Slot Machines for
Dummies can purport to tell you which kind of rabbit’s foot to rub or how to tell which machines are
“hot,” but it can’t tell you how to win.
> Did Bill Gates simply win the intelligence lottery? Was Sheryl Sandberg born with a silver spoon,
or did she “lean in”? When we debate historical questions like these, luck is in the past tense. Far
more important are questions about the future: is it a matter of chance or design?
Cramming for an entrance exam is a revolting waste of a life. It's enabled by a system that cannot and will not evaluate students on their ability to commit to something that actually matters.
I agree that "well-rounded" people without depth are not as interesting or as valuable as people who've picked one or more topics to learn in detail, especially since the latter can often be well-rounded and also have an area of expertise. However, a bit part of their value comes from their ability to do something without anyone telling them to do it. An engineer who spent six months writing a protein folding simulator out of obsessive interest is a much better pick for a computational chemistry course than one who spent that time in a cram school.
This is a straw-man argument. There's value in a well-rounded liberal arts education beyond job preparation. I say this as a math major with a molecular biology PhD. I took multiple classes in history, economics, etc. It allows one to develop healthy critical thinking skills; and also not underestimate the complexity of social issues facing us - in other words, it fortifies you against the likes of Thiel, who has no problem buying politicians with $$ and pushing for his extreme and frankly dangerous political agenda. Conservatives used to understand and value a classical Western education with room for the great works. Authoritarians don't like thinking citizens, however.
> You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it. Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.
> A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one. This is not what young people do today, because everyone around them has long since lost faith in a definite world. No one gets into Stanford by excelling at just one thing, unless that thing happens to involve throwing or catching a leather ball.
Cramming entrance exams is not super useful, but it does select for motivation and ability to focus intensely. Much more useful measure than having your parents set up a fake charity for you to volunteer at.