This has been a lot of my life. I wanted to be a mechanical engineer when I was younger, so I picked up a lot of the skills for that. I also became interested in architecture as a specific subset of that, which got me into learning about city planning, which got me into learning about systems infrastructure, which got me into learning about both classical and modern urbanism. I also learned a lot about internal combustion engines, which got me into learning about materials sciences, which got me into learning about chemistry, which curved back and got me into learning about metallurgy, which got me into learning about manufacturing processes.

I never became a mechanical engineer because my understanding of math at the time was poor. Instead I've jumped around from job to job or gig to gig, learning everything from woodworking and joinery to programming and electrical engineering. Each bit of work I did after the first dozen or so has supplemented or reinforced knowledge from other work I've done.

As a result I can give advice about pretty much anything you see standing on the street in a city, from where the concrete shape comes from and why that mix was chosen to why the street is so narrow to why the post office box is shaped like it is. Although a lot of this knowledge is shallow, it gives other people a good starting point to explain the more complex and in-depth topics of a given subject to me. That makes it easier for us to work with eachother and makes it easier for flaws in methodology, practice, or understanding to be noticed by both of us and thus makes it easier for me to understand where I went wrong. And if someone points out that I am wrong, that doesn't make me upset. It gets me excited because that means there's more to learn and more skills to acquire.

I doubt any of this would've been possible if I had actually gotten a stable job as a mechanical engineer and stuck to a single career path.