When I was a kid, I wanted to learn almost everything. theology, physics, chemistry, computer science, artificial intelligence, biology, not as curiosity for curiosity’s sake, but as a genuine orientation. I was drawn toward knowledge as a category, not toward any subject inside it. I wanted to understand how things worked, and I wanted to understand how they related to each other.
The problem was the people around me. not their fault, but they were the evidence I kept looking at. no one I could see excelled at all of it. not even close. the picture the world was showing me was that you pick a lane, you go deep, and that depth is where the results live. every system I was in, school, university, the way people talked about careers, rewarded the vertical. the specialist. the one who knows one thing completely. and I was not that. I was the one who kept moving horizontally, touching everything, carrying a general picture without owning any particular depth yet.
I made peace with that early, but the peace was fragile, because the slowness of it was hard to sit to accept.
Here is the framework I found for it, it was a conversation with my brother Mustafa, when I was around 16 maybe, and it helped me stop feeling like I was doing something wrong.
When you learn vertically, you go deep into one subject. you accumulate expertise in a specific domain, and the rewards are legible, grades, credentials, clear skill progression, the ability to say I know this field. the feedback loop is short. the results are visible relatively quickly. the world is designed to recognize and reward this path, because most institutions are built around it.
Horizontal learning is the opposite architecture. breadth before depth. you are acquiring a working familiarity with many domains, following threads between them, developing a sense of how ideas from one field illuminate problems in another. the rewards are not legible for a long time. there are no grades for pattern recognition across disciplines. no certificate for noticing that a concept in thermodynamics maps cleanly onto a concept in economics. the feedback is internal, and very slow to become visible to anyone else.
After years I spend there I don’t this it is about the horizontal learning is hard. it’s that it looks like nothing for years. you’re navigating without a map, following intuition about what connects to what, and the lines between subjects only start to appear after you’ve been at it long enough. if you’re not comfortable with that ambiguity , if you need external validation at regular intervals to keep going, horizontal learning will break you before it pays out.
I was lucky, in that I didn’t need the validation. I needed to understand. and understanding felt like its own return, even when it produced nothing anyone else could see.
The real cost I didn’t anticipate was social. watching people around you build visible things while you’re still laying foundations. I watched people finish degrees, get jobs, establish themselves in careers. they were building houses. real ones. ones that stood up and had addresses. and I was still underground, still mixing concrete, still figuring out the shape of what I was making. I was happy for them, I mean that, not as a performance of generosity but as something I actually felt, I wasn’t so into this cycle of comparing myself to other, nor others to others, but I also had to learn to be patient with my own timeline in a way that didn’t come naturally when I was a teenager, so highlighing this part is important.
The image I kept returning to was this: they were building villas. efficient, complete, beautiful. and I was laying the foundations for something I didn’t have a full blueprint for yet. not bigger. not better. just different in structure. and different structures take different amounts of time at different stages. the foundations of a large, complex thing take longer than the foundations of a smaller one.
What helped was. seven years of building before I started to see anything cohesive take shape. seven years of trusting a direction I couldn’t prove was right, couldn’t show anyone, couldn’t point to as evidence that the investment was paying off. and then, slowly, it did. not in a single moment, but in the way that convergence, a growing recognition that the things I had been carrying separately were starting to speak to each other. that the breadth had accumulated into something. that the horizontal had created the conditions for a different kind of depth.
I want to be careful about one thing, because I’ve seen this framing get misused: horizontal learning is not an excuse for avoiding commitment. it is not a story you tell yourself because going deep in anything feels hard or threatening. depth and breadth are not opposites that you choose between once and live with forever. what I’m describing is a sequence, not a preference. horizontal first, to find the real connections. depth later, and more meaningfully, because you know which depth matters and why.
The generalist who never goes deep is just someone who never finished. the specialist who never looked up is just someone who never saw what their work was part of. the interesting space is the one who did the horizontal work long enough to understand the terrain, and then found the places worth going deep into, and went.
That’s what the seven years were.