How many things to learn?

I was/am a MS tech fan due to my job and intrerest. For a long time, I was eager to learn everything about .net. For examples:

* There are more than 200 tech books on my bookshelf, Wrox, O’Reilly and others. My wife named Wrox area as “red-light district”, and O’Reilly area as “Zoo”;

* I collected webcasts and ebooks as possible as I can find. and burn them into DVD;

* There are hundreds of feeds in my rss reader, I subscribed all the popular blogs about .net, from MSDN to Scottgu, from Codeplex to Rob Conery;

* I browse Codeplex “tag by tag”, download all the pop projects;

Unfortunately, my interest was not just about this. I was interesting in OO/P/AD, design pattern, TDD, refectoring, UML/RUP, project management, agile project, enterprise framework, networking, web design, database，java, c++, python, javascript, even ERP for a while. Recently, the terrible interest spreads to ruby, ruby on rails, then linux server when I decide to deploy my toy project, then virtualization when I decide to setup my own vps of linux…

Sounds great, right? The truth is…

* half of books on my bookshelf were not touched,

* webcasts were reviewed when they were just downloaded, but never be opened after burned,

* there are always 5000+ unread feeds in my rss reader, sometime I will mark them as “read”, but the number came back soon;

* reading source code is good, but the projects which were really carefully researched are not much.

As everyone can guess, I may be an expert on “how many things do you know?”, but not an expert of each of the listed parts, although my interest has taken most of my free time :( . Sound despressed.

Write this because I read a blog “Do you have the time to learn everything“. I agree with some of its points. It’s definitely impossible to learn everything, people should has a limited learning list with prioritization, people should learn to make choice first. I know this from beginning, but when I start to be interesting in something, I feel this is the most important. what a fool!

Life is limited, knowledge is not. But if learning is as fun as playing game or watching TV, just do it.

That’s the words to comfort myself.