This is the D&D / video game fallacy — that being really good at hard things means you had forgo points in other skills. It should be encouraging and liberating that this isn't true and you can be smart (in multiple fields), athletic, artistic, charismatic, a social butterfly, and everything in between.
Definitely true, but sinking large amounts of time into learning very technical things in huge detail can often involve long periods in isolation during which one’s social skills are likely to atrophy.
Also, for some, being a ‘social butterfly’ is perfectly possible (with some effort) but is boring. This tends to be true the more into ‘hard things’ you are. Chatting to people about banality isn’t hard, so it isn’t interesting.
It is fundamentally true, though, because you "level up" those skills through concentrated effort, which requires focus and time, both of which are finite resources. It may feel you can improve on all without sacrificing something, but that just means you're operating far from Pareto frontier - i.e. you're not particularly good at anything.
> It is fundamentally true, though, because you "level up" those skills through concentrated effort, which requires focus and time, both of which are finite resources.
I dunno. My experience is that it's true for some fields, such as videogames/sports.
What I've found is that people who have true expertise in a field (excluding videogames/sports) are generally competent in a number of other fields. The characteristics required to become an expert oil painter or an expert in applied mathematics (for example) are focus, concentration and the ability to recognise new patterns as patterns, and then apply them!
IOW, someone who is an actual master in a certain field should easily become at least competent in other things that they try.
