Watching a bunch of youtube today subconsciously made me slip into a state of trying to understand the entire possible breadth of human experience, from a murderer's to a monk's to a entrepreneur's, and for a a change, I caught myself and was actually able to analyze this state.
A desire to understand the entirety of human experience, for me at least, stems from somewhat of a perverted sense of empathy. A sense of "don't judge until you've been in their shoes". This is a deeply, deeply flawed mental model that, while probably motivated by morally positive reasons, just falls apart when you try to implement it. You don't have to understand everyone to be nice to them. By trying to stretch yourself that thin in order to try and understand human experience, you become nothing. By trying to become everything, you are nothing.
You are made who you are as much by what you are not as what you are. In fact, I'd argue that you're not a lot more things than you are. And that's how it should be. That's how it should stay, because the finite should not strive for the infinite. Both in terms of the scope of your goals as well as in the scope of your character.
If you truly wish to be great, you need to focus. You need to choose an extremely, extremely narrow field of specialization and just break your head against it, over and over and over and over again, because anything less than everything you have will not do it. Not if you want to be truly great.
For me, that means that if I want to build great shit, that is all I must focus on. Greatness requires strict boundedness in your focus, as well as your desires. And one stems from the other.