Paint Drip People

Thought-provoking metaphor. Upon reflection, I think the article emphasizes the wrong aspect of this -- the drip part itself -- at the expense of the more interesting elements (the length and breadth of the horizontal line, the amount of paint, etc).<p>CURIOSITY seems to be the horizontal line; i.e. the person&#x27;s latent curiosity about things, domains, areas, etc, and the urge to explore&#x2F;discover is what drives the horizontal movement.<p>The &#x27;amount of paint&#x27; variable, which is clearly the most important part of the physical reality underpinning the metaphor, would perhaps be akin to COMPETENCE. Competence is a stand-in word for intelligence, grit, suitable background knowledge, and probably a host of other qualities.<p>So what&#x27;s the grand conclusion here? That highly curious and highly competent people tend to be prolific in their output?<p>Not so surprising perhaps, but fun to think about.

My first thought was &quot;people that do the boring enough stuff comparable to watching paint drip&#x2F;dry&quot; so dunno whether name is all that good or not.<p>But I definitely acquired some skills in similar method, just doing something, hitting a snag and exploring some niche of debugging or code to get that tiny speck of knowledge while otherwise not knowing all that much about adjacent subjects.

Thanks for sharing! I often call myself a flat bar, because I&#x27;m missing the one specialization for the T-shape. This description of the &#x27;paint drip person&#x27; hit really close to home, so I think that that&#x27;s what I&#x27;ll call myself in the future.

&gt; <i>Once it starts rolling, it’s not clear how far it will go. In any case, the brush keeps moving.</i><p>I like this. Sounds like one can have multiple drips going at once, including some that hve been dripping for a long time.<p>&gt; <i>Eventually the last drip stops and a new one starts.</i><p>Is this sentence saying that at some point the multiple ongoing drips might stop (or slow to a crawl), but the person is still learning, because they&#x27;re already starting new drips?<p>I&#x27;d prefer to avoid misinterpretations of short-attention-span or serial-dabbler.<p>Also, the characterization of T-shaped here speaks of interests, but the motivations for skill development might actually be necessities, such as in an early startup. The interest can be a side-effect of something needing doing. You start to dig into the solution domain, anchored around a real problem, and it becomes interesting.<p>If only we could be comb-shaped.

How is this different from &quot;senior generalist who did a few deep dives in specific areas and projects&quot;?

A particular type of essay that HN is an absolute sucker for — an awesome type of person that you&#x27;re supposed to identify with. Paint Drip Person. T-Shaped Person. Paul Graham has also written a bunch of these, so maybe it&#x27;s just in the DNA of the site.<p>I guess the classical example of this is the renaissance man, but that at least required different fields like art and science and not different kinds of programming.

This analogy seems like a stretch. An artist that has paint dripping from their strokes strikes me as sloppy. Is this analogy really tied to a single specific type of painting?